


Lest faith turn to despair:  Act I - Tuesday

by If_all_the_world_and_love_were_young



Series: Lest faith turn to despair [2]
Category: Young Americans (TV)
Genre: Boarding School, Criticism, Drama, F/M, Literary References & Allusions, Multi, Poetry, Pop Culture, Rawley Academy, Rebirth/rejuvenation, Sexual Content, Surreal, Teen Romance, True Love, Unofficial Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-11-21
Updated: 2000-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-18 18:23:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 24
Words: 46,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/If_all_the_world_and_love_were_young/pseuds/If_all_the_world_and_love_were_young
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/89848">Lest faith turn to despair</a></em> is a critical appreciation, in the form of a fanfiction sequel, of Steven Antin’s <em>Young Americans</em> (Columbia TriStar & Mandalay Television for The WB network, 2000), a dramatic essay in philosophy of love.</p>
<p><strong>Synopsis</strong>:  The original drama’s “true love” story affects that drama’s other characters.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/89848">Lest faith turn to despair</a></em> is a drama in five acts, plus <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3025873">prologue</a>, <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438438/chapters/3034030">intermezzo</a>, <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438567/chapters/3035860">envoi</a> and <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1437208">notes</a>.  Each act, like the intermezzo, covers one of six consecutive days around the Thanksgiving following the original drama.  Due to its length, it is posted on <em>Archive of Our Own</em> as a series of six works, with the notes as a separate work.</p>
<p>All sexually active characters are above the legal age of consent in the setting place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Frontispiece

The original drama,  _Young Americans_ , may be viewed online [here](http://www.youtube.com/user/IckyGrub).  Antin’s public comments on it may be read [here](https://sites.google.com/site/rawleyrevisited/antin-on-ya).

 

 

 

Love is strong as death, passion unyielding as the grave;

the flashes thereof are of fire, a very flame of the Lord.

– _Song of Song_ s 8:6

 

To be and to be seen to be thankful;

this is truly not only the greatest of the virtues,

but also the mother of all the rest.

– Cicero, _Pro Plancio_ xxxiii.

 

Stranger, dreams are very curious and unaccountable things, and they do not always come true.

There are two gates through which these unsubstantial fancies proceed;

one is of horn, the other of ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous,

but those from the gate of horn mean something.

– Penelope to the disguised Odysseus, _Odyssey_ xix

 

*       *       *


	2. Series Contents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Links to other parts of the drama, _[Lest faith turn to despair](http://archiveofourown.org/series/89848)_ , which, due to its length, is published on _Archive of Our Own_ as a series.

**[Series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/89848) Contents** :

[Notes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1437208): setting; _dramatis personae_ ; genre; allusions; obscenity; chronology.

[Prologue](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3025873)

[Act I - Tuesday](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123)

[Act II - Wednesday](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438222)

[Act III - Thanksgiving Day](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438309)

[Intermezzo - Friday](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438438/chapters/3034030)

[Act IV - Saturday](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438438)

[Act V - Sunday](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438567)

[Envoi](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438567/chapters/3035860)

 

Each act of this drama has its own scene-specific table of contents.

 

Photo above is the first shot of Hamilton Fleming (Ian Somerhalder) in _Young Americans_ (episode 1),

set over the front entrance of Rawley Academy for Boys (Tyrconnell estate, Towson, Maryland).

 

*       *       *


	3. Prologue

INT – RAWLEY BOYS’, MAIN GROUND FLOOR CORRIDOR. DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAWN).

 

(The camera paces the dimly-lit main corridor, looks in at and slowly around the dimly hearth-lit, window-draped common room, admires the wall art and furnishings, briefly checks the time on a grandfather clock in the entryway – about half past six – as someone waiting to meet someone might. At the sound of the front door opening, it turns and looks down into the stairwell-flanked vestibule.

The GROUNDSKEEPER comes in the front entrance, under the stair landing, dressed in a red-plaid wool hunting parka, scarf and hunting cap, his clothes and appearance reminiscent of Ignatius Reilly’s in _A Confederacy of Dunces_. He stomps snow off his feet, sets down a shovel, takes off his work gloves and cap, brushes off his coat with his cap, removes his snow boots, then looks up and trudges in.)

GROUNDSKEEPER (walking toward the common room, to the camera):

           Expecting Krudski? He’ll still be in bed.  
           It’s barely dawn. But there’s work to be done,  
           and mine to do – unless it’s in your head  
           to help? … (Pan out.) … Now, don’t run off. ‘Twas all in fun.

(He enters the common room, begins to open the drapes of the windows.  The camera follows as far as the threshold.)

           You can’t leave anyhow. A foot of snow  
           fell overnight. Two more to come, they say.  
           So wherever it is you’d like to go,  
           you can’t get there from here. You’ll have to stay.

(He throws a log on the fire, warms his hands, then looks up at the Rawley Academy crest, bearing the motto, **_VERITAS EST VIRTUS_** , above the mantle.)

           Plumbing and power still work. Chimney seems clear.  
           You want philosophy? Here’s some: don’t freeze.  
           And don’t think I’ll do all your dreaming here.

(Turning to face the camera:)

           I keep warm working. You’d best use your ease  
           to dream yourself your warmest age: sixteen.  
           But that’s enough talk – words don’t strut a screen.

(He exits to the corridor.)

 

*       *       *


	4. Contents of Act I - Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Links to the scenes of Act I of [_Lest faith turn to despair_](http://archiveofourown.org/series/89848).
> 
> Each below-listed scene of Act I is a chapter of this work.

            

**Act I - Tuesday**

      [Scene 1 - Gotta love tradition](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3026125)

      [Scene 2 - Arrows of desire](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3026263)

      [Scene 3 - The art of love](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3026419)

      [Scene 4 - Thanksgiving Past](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3026509)

      [Scene 5 - Ambiguity in Elysium](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3026617)

      [Scene 6 - Stranded is stranded](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3026806)

      [Scene 7 - Birthday presents](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3029461)

      [Scene 8 - _Facilior descensus Averno_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3029689) 

      [Scene 9 - Once Puritans, always Puritans](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3030490/)

      [Scene 10 - Telemachy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3030541) 

      [Scene 11 - A little bit o' luck](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3030928) 

      [Scene 12 - Rooftop revisited](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031120)

      [Scene 13 - Skin and bones](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031240)

      [Scene 14 - Wonders never cease](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031396) 

      [Scene 15 - Our town](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031576)

      [Scene 16 - Mementos](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031669) 

      [Scene 17 - Knitting and poking](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031789) 

      [Scene 18 - Fudge ...](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031879) 

      [Scene 19 - ... and fairy tales](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3031954) 

      [Scene 20 - _Veritas est virtus_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438123/chapters/3032083)

 

Photo above is of Will Krudski (Rodney Scott) writing on the shore of Lake Rawley (Loch Raven Fishing Center, Towson, Maryland), shown during his narrator's preface to episode 1 of _Young Americans_ , as Will states that he will attend Rawley Academy.

 

            *       *       *


	5. Scene 1 - Gotta love tradition

INT - RAWLEY BOYS’, SCOUT’S & WILL’S DORM ROOM, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - EARLY MORNING)

 

(Pan out from the last shot of the original drama – DEAN Fleming’s note to WILL Krudski informing him that he can return to Rawley fall term, tucked into the corner of the mirror above SCOUT Calhoun’s dresser. As a slow-tempo rendition of the [Westminster Quarters](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/BBC_World_Service_Westminster_chimes.ogg), followed by seven hour-strokes, is heard from the chapel bell carillon outside, the note fades out. Items including a leather shaving kit, mobile phone, wallet, key ring and an harmonica materialize atop the dresser in dim light.

Seen in the mirror, SCOUT, in boxers, finishes making his bed. He grabs two Rawley-crest towels hanging from hooks on the door, tosses one over a shoulder, goes to the dresser, looks in the mirror, runs his free hand through his hair.

SCOUT (loudly): Up and at it, model scholar. Another day of opportunity to exceed expectations.

(SCOUT, and the camera, turn toward a second bed near the room’s triple-panel arched window, over which a bamboo-slat blind remains lowered. From under two woolen blankets, WILL Krudski struggles up onto an elbow. SCOUT throws a towel at WILL, then retreats into the walk-in closet.

WILL throws off his covers, revealing an open textbook and a flashlight under them. He marks his place in the book with a postcard of the Château de Chillon, sets it atop his nightstand, puts the flashlight into a drawer, drapes the towel around his neck, and stands, boxer-clad. He yawns, stretches, raises the blind. Outside the second-story room, tree branches are deeply covered by heavily-falling snow. )

WILL: Looks like I’ve been upstaged, Scout. _That_ exceeds expectations.

SCOUT (emerging from the walk-in, now wrapped in a towel): Wow! It sure does. … Beautiful, isn’t it?

WILL (shrugging facetiously): It’s not exactly Chamonix …

SCOUT (amused): And you, townie, are not exactly the same guy you were five months ago. (He picks up a backpack from the floor next to his desk, sets it on his desk chair, starts to stuff books and papers into it.)

WILL: None of us is, Scout. None of us should be. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?

SCOUT: It is. So could we forget my having said last June that this room isn’t exactly the Waldorf?

WILL: After you booked us a room there, on our way back from St. Martin, because I’d never heard of it? No way! … Besides, I’ll never forget any of that day, the day I first …

SCOUT: Heard of the Waldorf? Will, you liked it that much?

WILL (looking sidelong at SCOUT): Way too much, guy.

(From the corridor, a series of ever-louder knocks on doors, and the voice of HAMILTON Fleming.)

HAMILTON (loudly): Snow day schedule! Read your notice!

WILL: "Hark, hark! The lark at heaven's gate sings."

HAMILTON (even louder): School calendar change! Read your notice!

SCOUT (wincing): "Is it the lark that sings so out of tune?"

WILL: No nightingale. "The strain of strutting Chanticleer"?

SCOUT (walking to the door): Yeh, our Dean's son cometh.

(SCOUT opens the door just in time to stop HAMILTON from knocking. Down the corridor, groggy half-naked boys moan as they read the notices jammed into their doors.)

HAMILTON (in open parka, loose scarf, pullover sweater, brushed denim jeans, sockless topsiders): ‘Morning, Scout, Will. Have a notice.

SCOUT (taking a notice): ‘Morning, Hamilton. Thanks.

HAMILTON: Don’t mention it. … Nice towel.

SCOUT: I’m sure it’d look better on Jake.

HAMILTON: It might look good in my Christmas present for him.

SCOUT: A quilt of Rawley linens?

HAMILTON: A photo album of Rawley guys. Think I might come by and shoot some candids? Just your usual dorm attire - boxers, gym shorts, low-cut jeans … this little number. Will, you too, of course.

(From the corridor, snickers and chortles. WILL picks up a Jew’s harp lying on his dresser.)

SCOUT: Fleming, don’t you have work to do?

HAMILTON: Thanks for reminding me. Have I mentioned that this room is perfectly Feng Shui? Doors face snow, windows face snow …

SCOUT: Yes, I believe you have.

HAMILTON: See ya when I see ya, guys.

(WILL looking at HAMILTON, plays a single loud, long “boing” on his Jew’s harp.  

HAMILTON grins, then continues down the corridor, knocking and shouting.)

SCOUT (firmly shutting the door): Will, what have we done to rate that?

WILL (setting the harp back down): Uh, well, among other things … found out that Jake Pratt’s a girl?

SCOUT: Yeh. Ignorance was bliss.

WILL (starting to make his bed): Really? You’d rather think what everybody else here at Rawley thinks? That Ham’s a pathetic gay guy … unable to let go of a boyfriend who ran off to another school … and has never once come back to visit him?

SCOUT: Uh … no.

WILL: Rather never have heard the story Jake and Ham told us on our walk to Carson last August?

SCOUT: No.

WILL: Rather never have seen Jacqueline in a skirt? Never have had that kiss she gave you at the bus station at Grottlesex?

SCOUT: Noooo …

WILL: Right. … So what’s the word?

SCOUT (reading the notice, quickly at first): “Rawley Academy. Office of the Dean. Tuesday, November twenty-first. To all students, faculty and staff: … (Slowing:) The school is on a snow day schedule today. All classes, exams, breakfast and lunch are moved back one hour. Afternoon activities are cancelled. Morning and afternoon shoveling assignments will be issued to all Boys’ School students in the common room between seven-thirty and eight A.M.”

WILL (finishing his bed-making): Shoveling? This wasn’t in the brochure. You rich kids can’t afford snow blowers?

SCOUT: Builds character, Will. Down in the storeroom there’s a shovel with your name on it. Literally. It’ll be given to you when you graduate. I’ve used my dad’s more times than I care to recall.

WILL: Gotta love tradition. OK, let’s hit the showers and get to it.

SCOUT: Wait, there’s more: “The region’s highways, airports and railroads are closed, and expected to stay closed through Thanksgiving Day. Plane and long-distance train seats may be scarce for some days thereafter. Consequently, Thanksgiving break will be shortened by a week, and Christmas break lengthened by a week, through January 13th. Winter term classes start next Monday, November 27th. The dorms will remain open, and the dining hall will serve meals, throughout the shortened break.”

WILL: Bummer. Makes sense, though. A Thanksgiving break that’s less than a week long and doesn’t include Thanksgiving Day isn’t worth taking – especially for kids who live far away. That it?

SCOUT: Not quite: “This information is being sent to all parents by phone or e-mail. Nevertheless, students are urged to contact their families or other intended Thanksgiving hosts.”

WILL: That’s you, buddy.

SCOUT: Later. Mom won’t be up yet. And Dad’s keeping ungodly hours – the Senate’s still trying to pass a budget. I’m off to the showers. You coming?

WILL: Change of plans. I’ll shower after shoveling. My mom will be up, and I’d like to talk to her.

SCOUT (taking his mobile phone from atop his dresser, crossing the room to hand it to WILL): Then use my cell. And say hi to her for me.

WILL (taking the phone from SCOUT’s hand a bit more slowly than he might): Thanks, Scout.

SCOUT: ‘Welcome, Will. … (He lingers near WILL, looking pensively out the window.) … [Winter, and still paying for summer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM2g0oi3AdU&list=PLA10C44E0818EDF0D&index=4). When will it all end?

WILL: All what?

SCOUT: Neither of us having girls. My being hung up on a girl who may be my half-sister. Her liking you but being too bummed out to go for you. Ham’s pretending that his girl is a guy. … (With a sidelong look at WILL:) My wishing I had Ham’s knack for turning a guy into a girl by kissing him.

WILL (smiling faintly, turning away from SCOUT to watch the snowfall with him): Oh, all that. It’ll end.

SCOUT: Does your crystal ball tell you when, and how?

WILL (shrugging): When Jacqueline comes back? That might put it all right.

SCOUT: Guy, your faith’s inspiring, but that’s not going to happen.

WILL: Don’t give up on true love, _coloc_. It always wins in the end.

SCOUT: I wish. But not this time. Pratt would never come back here as a guy. And if she tried, Ham wouldn’t let her.

WILL: Neither would we.

SCOUT: No joke. And she can’t come back to Rawley as a girl without first having been booted for having enrolled here as a guy last summer.

WILL (wryly): Details ...

SCOUT (rolling his eyes): Right. … But she left voluntarily, so she can’t be booted. So she can’t come back – ever. Catch twenty-two.

WILL: So it seems.

SCOUT: Seems?

WILL (shrugging): Sometimes things aren’t what they look like.

SCOUT: You know something I don’t, Krudski?

WILL (leaning back against the windowsill, facing SCOUT): Lots of things, Calhoun. That’s why I get a free ride here, while you pay through the nose. And that’s why you like me – for my brains, right?

SCOUT: Umm … I’m late for my shower. (He turns, grabs the shaving kit from his dresser.)

WILL: Scout, trust Hamilton. Trust this school. Trust us. And trust whatever’s given us everything we’ve got. It’s Thanksgiving, remember?

(SCOUT purses his lips, nods, walks to the door, pauses, surveys the room.)

SCOUT: You know, Will, I was wrong that day.

WILL: What day?

SCOUT: First day of summer session. The day you and I first met.

WILL (smiling softly): Oh … Wrong about what?

SCOUT: About this room not being the Waldorf. Any room with you in it _is_ the Waldorf, Will.

WILL: Get outta here, future statesman.

(SCOUT opens the door, leaves. WILL turns toward the window. Looking out at the snow, smiling, he punches a number into SCOUT’s phone, raises it to his ear.)

  
*       *       * 


	6. Scene 2 - Arrows of desire

EXT – RAWLEY BOYS’, FRONT DRIVEWAY – TUESDAY (DAY - MORNING)

 

(The first-year boys, only half-done shoveling the large oval driveway of Rawley Academy's boys' school, are under snowball attack from growing numbers of upperclassmen who apparently have completed easier shoveling assignments. HAMILTON, just outside the driveway, is photographing the snowball fight, positioned so that several shovels grounded in the snowbank at the driveway’s edge are in his foreground. His shovel is grounded in the snow. Near him, WILL, SCOUT, and MARK Johnson, clad like HAMILTON and most other boys there in down parkas, scarves and snowboots, are packing and throwing snowballs. Three golden retrievers frisk playfully around HAMILTON.

SCOUT attempts twice to pack and throw a snowball with gloved hands, but on each occasion, his snowball falls apart soon after leaving his hand. The lightness of the newfallen snow in this cold requires that one pack snowballs bare-handed, as other boys, including WILL and MARK, are doing.)

SCOUT (as his second snowball disintegrates): Aw, crap!

MARK: Yet another thing better done with fewer clothes, Scout.

(SCOUT shoots MARK a disconcerted glance.)

HAMILTON (from behind his camera): I think Mark might be content – for now – if you just took off your gloves.

(MARK holds out his own bare hands, then packs a firm snowball to underscore the point. WILL rolls his eyes at SCOUT, and does the same. SCOUT, plainly embarrassed, removes and pockets his gloves, successfully packs and throws a snowball, grins.)

SCOUT: Thanks, guys. Why am I so useless?

HAMILTON (continuing to photograph): Curse of the Caribbean, Calhoun. You’ve spent so many winter breaks in the islands, you’ve forgotten how to pack a snowball.

SCOUT (packing another ball): Look who’s talking. A guy who spent the summer before last touring the museums of Europe. … (Throwing:) We’re getting plastered here, Fleming. Why don’t you come help us?

HAMILTON: ‘Cause you can’t win. This act plays at first snowfall every year. The upperclassmen keep coming and keep shooting till we give up and go back to shoveling. Then they come help us. It’s tradition.

WILL: Of course we’ll lose. It’s our role. We’re the first-years.

SCOUT: But it’s fun, Ham. That’s why you see it every year.

HAMILTON (still photographing): Suit yourselves.

MARK: They love us, Ham. That’s why they’re pounding us. Every ball’s packed by some guy’s warm, bare hands. You might like it.

(SCOUT and WILL roll their eyes at each other.)

HAMILTON: Careful, Mark. You might inspire Will to wax poetic.

MARK: Yeh. … (Imitating WILL’s voice:) “I am snow. You are hands. I grow firm from your warm packing.”

(SCOUT and HAMILTON choke back laughs. MARK turns away from WILL and ducks, to take on his back the snowball with which WILL rewards that parody.)

MARK: Ow! … Not to worry, Krudski. You’ll write better for the right girl.

WILL: How the hell did you all hear about that?

HAMILTON: Ryder can’t resist telling tales of his triumphs. Even when they backfire on him.

WILL (turning his snowball-throwing back toward the upperclassmen): Didn’t backfire enough. The Limey bastard chased Caroline off to Switzerland this term.

SCOUT (grinning as one of his snowballs finds its target): She’ll be back next term, with flawless French _et plus charmante que jamais_. Right, Ham?

HAMILTON: _C’est ça qu’on attend, mec_. … (Holding up his camera:) Will, come take one of me, please?

WILL (surprised): Sure. … (Leaving the snowball fight and walking toward HAMILTON:) Didn’t know you let anybody else touch your shutterbox, ever.

HAMILTON (softly, while handing WILL the camera): Will, you’re not seeing the picture.

WILL: I do words, not pictures, guy. So how do I work this thing?

HAMILTON: You don’t, you just pretend to. It’s a word, not a picture, that I want. … Will, do you really think Caroline Busse would let herself be run off campus by a jerk?

WILL: Doesn’t seem much like her, does it?

HAMILTON: No. So maybe you’re giving Ryder too much credit.

WILL (pretending to start to focus the camera for a close-up of HAMILTON): Meaning what?

HAMILTON: Maybe she left so she wouldn’t stand in the way of the guy who’d helped her keep her faith in love when Ryder tried to destroy it.

WILL: Excuse me?

HAMILTON: Will, last July you took a girl you were dating to the birthday party of a girl you’ve been close to since you were little. You expected them not to talk?

WILL: Caroline’s talked to Bella, about me?

HAMILTON: First week of August break. Right after Sean broke up with Bella ‘cause he saw she’d woken up to what she’d always felt for you. Caroline wanted to invite you to the Vineyard, but you’d disappeared. She didn’t know you’d gone to St. Martin with Scout. So she called Bella, ended up inviting her instead. I think they kinda … bonded. Over you.

WILL (lowering the camera): Oh god … And you heard this how?

HAMILTON: From Bella, two weeks later. When she visited Jake and me in Manhattan, while Jake’s mom was in Hollywood.

WILL: And you tell me now why?

HAMILTON (shrugging): Until now, I thought you knew.

WILL (glumly, handing the camera back to HAMILTON): I was happier blaming Ryder.

HAMILTON: Speak of the devil …

(Forrest RYDER, wearing a herringbone greatcoat, unfastened, white scarf and turtleneck, grey woolen slacks, and snowboots, shovel jauntily shouldered, saunters up to HAMILTON along a shoveled path from an arch in the stone wall between the driveway and the gardens. WILL rolls his eyes at HAMILTON, clasps his arm, rejoins the snowball fight. HAMILTON, ignoring RYDER, resumes photographing.)

RYDER (in a north-country English accent): Hullo, Fleming. Immortalizing the annual slaughter of the first-years?

HAMILTON (without looking at RYDER): ‘Morning, Ryder. Yeh.

RYDER: How edifying!

          Go, stranger, and to the first-years tell  
          that here, once thick as they are now, we fell.

HAMILTON (failing to suppress a chuckle): Exactly.

RYDER: Missed you this weekend. More merry mintiness at Grottlesex?

HAMILTON: Ryder, who do you annoy when I’m gone?

RYDER: Fleming, you’re irreplaceable. A pity Pratt never comes back here weekends. Why is that?

HAMILTON: Maybe ‘cause no one at Grottlesex can hold a candle to you.

RYDER: How sad! Perhaps I’ll drive up there and show how it’s done. Like a ride next time you go?

HAMILTON: To be spared your company, the bus fare’s cheap. … Well, that’s the end of a roll.

(HAMILTON begins to change the film in his camera, placing the used film in a small plastic canister and putting it into his right outside parka pocket. RYDER watches closely, feigning disinterest.)

HAMILTON: So why aren’t you up there on the veranda pummeling us, second-year?

RYDER: Just my irrepressible sympathy for the underdog.

HAMILTON: Sure it’s not that you prefer to watch pain from close up?

RYDER: Fleming, how could you think that of me? … Say, Krudski, want a spot of help?

WILL: "If we are mark’d to die, we are enough  
          To do our country loss; and if to live,  
          The fewer men, the greater share of honour."

(Two snowballs in quick succession strike WILL.)

WILL: But sure, Ryder, come join us. The more the merrier.

(RYDER grounds his shovel in the snowbank, takes off his gloves. From a position behind HAMILTON, he begins to lob snowballs at the upperclassmen on the veranda.)

RYDER (half-[singing](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSVXqEM2Vxc), with gleeful sarcasm, a line per snowball, as he packs and throws):

          “Bring me my bow of burning gold;  
           Bring me my arrows of desire:  
           Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!  
           Bring me my chariot of fire!"

(Snowballs aimed at RYDER begin to hit HAMILTON, who ignores them, and continues photographing.)

RYDER: "I will not cease from mental fight,  
             Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,  
             Till … "

(A snowball hits HAMILTON’s camera.)

HAMILTON: Alright, that’s enough. … (He closes his camera, puts it into an inside pocket of his parka, takes off his gloves, puts them into his right outside parka pocket. To RYDER:) See who threw that?

RYDER (packing another ball, coming forward to HAMILTON’s right side): Stratton. Just left of the door.

(On the veranda, KYLE Stratton, faced turned to a friend, is laughing. HAMILTON quickly packs a snowball, throws, packs a second even as the first hits KYLE on the head. As KYLE recovers and turns, HAMILTON throws the second snowball, missing KYLE but hitting another of the tightly-packed upperclassmen.)

RYDER: That’s the form, Fleming! (He throws, missing KYLE but hitting yet another of KYLE’s friends, puts his left arm around HAMILTON, kisses him quickly on the cheek, blows a kiss at KYLE.)

KYLE (shouting): Freaks!

HAMILTON (laughing and disengaging from RYDER as the upperclassmen begin to pummel them): Tosser. The whole girls’ school will hear about that.

RYDER (shrugging, as and he and HAMILTON return fire): I’ve bonked only half of them. Makes the rest more curious.

(Soon HAMILTON and RYDER, fresh to the fight, are the most targeted of the increasingly overwhelmed boys in the driveway. The upperclassmen, apparently now all present, begin to chant: “SHOVEL, SHOVEL, SHOVEL.”)

RYDER (getting pelted, to HAMILTON): Perhaps there’s wisdom in their advice.

HAMILTON (also heavily pelted): Yeh, there is. How the hell did I forget?

(HAMILTON pulls his gloves out of his pocket. As he does so, the film canister, unnoticed by the nearly-blinded HAMILTON, falls out of that pocket into the snow. RYDER, seizing the opportunity he has created, pretends to lose his footing, falls on top of the canister, inconspicuously pockets it.)

RYDER (getting up, pulling on his gloves and picking up his shovel): Ah, but it was glorious, Fleming. Years from now, you’ll remember this.

HAMILTON (starting to shovel): I’ll remember I was an idiot … again.

RYDER: No, you were magnificent. Let me be the first upperclassman to join you in shoveling.

(As HAMILTON and RYDER shovel, the upperclassmen’s attentions move to the dwindling number of first- years who are still fighting back. SCOUT, WILL and MARK give up and join HAMILTON in shoveling.)

MARK (softly, to HAMILTON, nodding his head toward RYDER): _Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_.

WILL: Yeh, when that ass-bite’s nice, he’s about to screw you.

HAMILTON: I know.

SCOUT: So where’s his wooden horse?

(With all the first-years now subdued and shoveling dutifully, the upperclassmen cheer, stream into the driveway, and join in shoveling.)

 

*       *       *


	7. Scene 3 - The art of love

INT - RAWLEY BOYS’, CLASSROOM - TUESDAY (DAY - MORNING)

 

(SCOUT, WILL, HAMILTON, MARK, BRANDON Bradshaw, STEWART Prescott and half a dozen other boys sit talking in a classroom with wood-paneled walls, inset bookshelves, parka-laden coat-pegs on the wall by the door, a chalkboard, a pulled-down scroll-map of the ancient Mediterranean, and a bust of Marcus Aurelius. All the boys wear dress shirts, ties, and dark blue blazers embroidered on the front pocket with the Rawley seal – still, as in the original drama, the same book-and-crowns emblem displayed in [the arms of the University of Oxford](http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/oua/enquiries/university-arms).)

       

MARK (to BRANDON): Art class was a gas.

BRANDON: I thought you had a final.

MARK: We did. But most of it was a project we just had to turn in. Ham’s mom kept the rest of it short, then gave us her annual first-snowfall special – all about snow and ice sculptures.

FIRST BOY: Yeh, who knew there’s a whole hotel made of ice in Sweden?

SCOUT: Speaking of your mom, Ham, it was worth the shoveling just to have her serve my eggs this morning. The regular dining hall ladies sort of kill the appetite.

STEWART: Could be a deliberate economy measure.

HAMILTON: Can it, clowns.

WILL: Did some of the dining hall staff not make it to work this morning?

HAMILTON: No, they all showed. My mom helped out so that Mrs. Haggerty could take an inventory. We’ve gotta feed nearly four hundred kids for five days during which we’d expected to be closed, and more deliveries won’t come till Monday.

SCOUT: Ouch, that is a problem.

HAMILTON: Yeh, one that phone calls to Washington can’t fix.

SCOUT: Sorry. I’m just bummed that I can’t be with my family. And envious that you can be with yours.

HAMILTON (clasping SCOUT’s forearm): You are with family, Scout.

BRANDON (clearing his throat): Missing Jake, Hamilton?

(HAMILTON glares at BRANDON.)

BRANDON: Just don’t get all mushy on us, OK?

MARK (to BRANDON): Chill, roomie. … (To HAMILTON:) So, are we going on half-rations, or what?

HAMILTON: No, there’s enough. But we’ll be scraping bottom. Meat loaf …

(Groans from all.)

HAMILTON: Oatmeal for breakfasts.

MARK: Thanksgiving dinner?

HAMILTON: Looks bleak. No turkeys but the ones in the woods. The supermarket may not have enough to supply the town, and it won’t get any more before Thursday.

STEWART: I'd gladly go turkey shooting instead of shoveling, if …

FINN (entering): _Salve, pueri_.

BOYS: _Salve, doctor_ … (Surprised:) Finn?

FINN (taking off his coat): Dr. Hotchkiss can’t be with you this morning, gentlemen. … (Glancing at HAMILTON:) Some of you might want to dig him out. I’m subbing. (He hangs his coat on a peg.)

MARK (wryly): So we’ll hold class outdoors?

SCOUT: And it'll be co-ed?

FINN: I wish, Mr. Johnson. And as you know, Mr. Calhoun, Latin isn't required for the girls, just as home ec isn't required for you.

SECOND BOY: More girls might take it as an elective if the teacher were young, single and good-looking.

STEWART: A passionate rowing coach without a grey hair in his lovely Irish locks.

FINN: Perhaps I should speak with Miss Sumner on your behalf, Mr. Prescott?

STEWART (to SECOND BOY): Who says flirting with the teacher can't get you anywhere?

WILL: What about your third-year history class, Finn?

FINN: They’re taking their final. And Dr. Hotchkiss has finished grading yours. The exam books are snowed in with him. But he asked me to tell you that none of you even came close to having to repeat this course.

(Cheers, hi-fives, and back-slapping all round.)

FINN (seating himself atop a corner of the teacher’s desk, not behind it): Congratulations, gentlemen.

FIRST BOY: Wouldn’t have happened if you guys who took Latin in middle school hadn’t given the rest of us a lot of help this term.

WILL: Yeh, the summer session catch-up course wasn’t really enough. Thanks, guys. Without you …

SECOND BOY: You’re welcome. Stop it, please. The lesson, Finn?

FINN: Yes. … I understand it’s Ovid.

SCOUT: That’s right, _Ars Amatoria_ , Book 2. We’re at “ _Crede mihi, non est Veneris properanda voluptas_.”

FINN: I commend your extracurricular reading, Mr. Calhoun, but isn’t the lesson from Book 11 of the _Metamorphoses_? Dr. Hotchkiss may be getting on in years, but his assignments on the school LAN seem quite clear.

SCOUT: Can’t blame a guy for trying.

FINN: For not trying hard enough I can. Knowing what to do in bed is useless until you get a girl into one. For that, there’s nothing like a love story, and today’s lesson is antiquity’s greatest.

BRANDON: No guy in his right mind would tell an old Greek myth to a girl on a date.

WILL: Actually, Brandon, [I have](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrIE5tJHaJI). This very myth, in fact.

BRANDON (smirking): How’d that work out?

WILL: Well, until some friends behaving badly ruined the evening. That wasn’t the myth’s fault. … (To FINN:) And I’ve heard an updated version of it that might work even better.

FINN (smiling faintly): So have I, Mr. Krudski. We moderns can surpass the ancients. But we begin at the beginning. So please begin, Mr. Calhoun.

SCOUT (opening his book, reading): _Carmine dum tali silvas animosque ferarum_  
_Threicius vates et saxa sequentia ducit_ …

 

*       *       *


	8. Scene 4 - Thanksgiving Past

EXT - NEW RAWLEY, MAIN STREET, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - MORNING)

 

Establishing shot of exterior of SUSAN Krudski’s Glamorama Beauty Salon on New Rawley’s main street. Snow falls heavily. A snowplow labors to clear and sand the street. A few vehicles crawl about, tires chained, headlights on, wipers beating.

 

 

 

INT - SUSAN KRUDSKI’S BEAUTY SALON, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - MORNING)

 

(The salon is packed, humming with female voices. No mere snowstorm keeps a New England woman from her pre-Thanksgiving beauty parlor appointment. MARY McGrail, SEAN’s mother, enters, wearing a trenchcoat and hooded scarf.)

SUSAN (settling a customer under a perm-setting hair dryer): Come in Mary. Coat rack’s full, just toss your things on a chair. I’ll be with you in a minute.

MARY: Thank God the school bus made it. Almost on time – allowing for the two-hour delay in opening.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Better late than never.

HAIRDRESSER: A little snow can’t close down this town.

MARY: It may tomorrow. At least the schools. The half-day session will be cancelled.

SECOND CUSTOMER: Hadn’t heard that.

MARY: You will.

FIRST CUSTOMER: You sound pretty sure.

MARY: It’s my business to know. Edmund High PTA President. Comes with the territory.

SUSAN: Come on, Mary, I’m ready for you. The usual?

MARY (settling into the chair): Yes, but not too short. I’ll want the warmth.

SUSAN (setting to work): How’s Sean?

MARY: Oh, he’s surviving. Done with football, unless this all melts, but looking forward to hockey. Bella’s the one I’m worried about.

SUSAN: Me too. She still hasn’t come out of her shell.

MARY: Half a loaf isn’t enough for her, I guess. But I thought she accomplished a lot.

SUSAN: In moving her mom to lease Charlie the gas station? Yes she did. But she can’t accept that that will end when Grace turns eighteen. She seems to have thought she’d just stay there forever.

MARY: Well, Charlie may. He’s resourceful. But Bella should be thinking about college. Her teachers are wild about her.

SUSAN: Yes, she should. But Bella’s never gotten over being left by her mom, has she? She’s dead set on clinging tight to what she’s got.

MARY: And too unhappy that she can’t to have much use for boys. But time heals; that’ll pass. How’s Will?

SUSAN: He phoned this morning. … We’re having one of his teachers over for Thanksgiving. A bachelor who grew up here. Finn. Remember him?

MARY: How could I forget? Not every day a guy from this town goes to Harvard. Even less often that one comes back. … And he’s memorable in other ways, too.

(SUSAN and MARY laugh.)

MARY (now thoughtful): You know, since he did come back, your husband just might like him. … Your Will’s quite a schemer, isn’t he?

SUSAN: Will just thinks about the good stuff.

MARY: So he phoned to make sure your Thanksgiving dinner’s still on track?

SUSAN: No, he called about the Rawley kids. They can’t leave. Airports, railroad, the Interstate – they’re all closed, and they’re staying closed. So the preps will be spending Thanksgiving at school. Dean Fleming’s keeping the dorms and cafeteria open.

MARY: They can’t go home?

FIRST CUSTOMER: That’s horrible!

SUSAN: It’s happened before. Remember, Mary?

MARY: Oh god yes! We were in high school, weren’t we? And our parents all took in a preppy for Thanksgiving dinner. I got some cute geek with glasses. But you, Susan – you got that hopeless lothario Calhoun.

SUSAN: Still envious?

MARY: Of course not.

SUSAN: Uh - huh. And now he's working his tail off in Washington for the likes of us when he could be sipping piña coladas in the Caribbean. It’s a wonder how things like that happen, isn’t it?

MARY: Point taken. We’ll do as our parents did. Finish me up fast. Just make it half-presentable. I don’t suppose you happen to know how many students Rawley has now?

SUSAN: Three hundred seventy-eight, including both schools, boys’ and girls’.

MARY: You've studied their stats?

SUSAN: I phoned to ask … this morning. (She stops clipping and begins blow-drying.)

MARY: I’ll set up shop in the office at Edmund and contact all the parents by e-mail and the phone tree. And get some students to help after school transcribing the invitations for delivery to Dr. Fleming. I’ll need to cart them all home tonight – thank God for four-wheel-drive SUV’s! Oh, and I’d better pick up some pizzas on the way.

SECOND CUSTOMER: I’ll come over to help man the phones as soon as I’m done here.

FIRST CUSTOMER: I’d like to, but I can’t. Sorry.

MARY: Thanks, Madge. And no problem, Harriet – I’ll get my pound of flesh from you another time.

SUSAN (turning off the blow dryer and giving MARY’s hair a quick brushing): Don’t look in the mirror, but we’ll call that done for now. We’ll close early tomorrow, at three. Come by then, we’ll have the place all to ourselves, and I’ll do you up right – on the house. Now help me get something out of the back.

MARY: What?

SUSAN: Four microwavable pizzas and two half-gallons of Coke. Come on, help me lug them to your car.

MARY: I wonder where your son got his scheming ways.

 

*       *       *


	9. Scene 5 - Ambguity in Elysium

INT - RAWLEY BOYS’, CLASSROOM, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - MORNING)

(The Latin class continues. A few difficult phrases from the reading, together with lines connecting modifiers with what they modify, and root forms of some inflections, are scrawled on the chalkboard.)

HAMILTON (reading): _Hic modo coniunctis spatiantur passibus ambo,_  
 _nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit_  
 _Eurydicenque suam iam tuto respicit Orpheus._

FINN: So, Mr. Fleming, please summarize: How does the story end?

HAMILTON: After the Maenads tear Orpheus apart, he’s reunited with Eurydice in the Elysian Fields, where she’s his, and he can safely walk with her and look at her however and whenever he likes.

BRANDON: They die happily ever after.

FINN: Thank you, Mr. Fleming. And yes, Mr. Bradshaw, you could say that. … What’s the part of speech, case and number of “ _passibus_ ,” Mr. Calhoun?

SCOUT: Ablative plural noun. Could be dative plural, grammatically, but not in this context. “They both walk stepping together,” not “to the steps together.” Same for “ _coniunctis_ ” – could be dative plural, but it’s not. They walk connectedly, together, not to a connection. It’s a double ablative.

FINN: Exactly, Mr. Calhoun. And why “ _spatiantur passibus_ ,” “they walk stepping,” Mr. Johnson? Isn’t that a bit redundant?

MARK: It is. But so is “both together.” Two parallel redundancies. They reinforce each other. … (Looking at HAMILTON:) Together, they suggest that Orpheus and Eurydice don't just love each other, but do it really well – that they’re in step with each other, that they’ve got chemistry, that they click.

(HAMILTON shoots a sidelong warning glance at MARK.)

FINN: Nicely put, Mr. Johnson. … And “ _iam tuto_ ,” Mr. Krudski? What’s that, and what does it modify?

WILL: It’s two adverbs, “now” and “safely.” You can read them as separate adverbs, “ _iam_ ” modifying “ _suam_ ” and “ _tuto_ ” modifying “ _respicit_ ” – she’s his now and he can look at her safely. Or you can read both adverbs as a single phrase, “now safely,” modifying either “ _suam_ ” or “ _respicit_ ” or both. Either she’s safely his now, or he can look at her safely now. Maybe both, but they aren’t quite the same thing.

SCOUT (glumly): Yeh, there are lots of ways to lose a girl.

WILL: You can even read “now safely” as modifying all the verbs in the sentence, the way Hamilton just did: now he can not only look at her safely, but also walk with her safely – but she’s not “safely his.” That ambiguity is the art of the last line, isn’t it? The way you read it tells you more about yourself than about Orpheus.

FINN: Indeed it does, Mr. Krudski. … Well done, gentlemen. Dr. Hotchkiss seems not to have lost his touch since I sat where you’re sitting now. … I understand you read Virgil’s version of the same story, in book 4 of the _Georgics_ , last week. Does that version end the same way?

FIRST BOY: No, there’s no happy ending in Virgil. She’s sucked back into the underworld, he gets torn apart, and that’s it.

FINN: Which version do you think is better?

WILL: Ovid’s. Because that’s just part of how his version differs from Virgil’s. Virgil’s Eurydice goes back into the underworld berating Orpheus for having failed to save her. But Ovid’s Eurydice goes back without complaining – _quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam_ – “for what complaint had she, save she was loved?”

STEWART: Ovid’s ending sounds to me like pie in the sky, even if it’s mirth under the earth.

SCOUT: Ewww … but Stewart has a point. Doesn’t the happy ending sort of cheapen the tragedy?

WILL: No, because Ovid’s version isn’t a tragedy. Orpheus doesn’t fail to save Eurydice. She goes back to the underworld knowing she was loved. So she goes back to a different part of it – the fields of the blessed. And that’s where he rejoins her.

BRANDON: Maybe. But he still screwed up, and because he did, she’s still dead.

MARK: Did he screw up, Brandon? His strength and his weakness are just two sides of the same coin. Because he loves her enough to go down into hell for her, he can’t help but look back at her. Ovid’s saying she understands that – that’s why she doesn’t complain. And of course Pluto understands that, too. He sets the condition that he sets because he knows Orpheus can’t meet it.

(WILL, surprised, nods appreciatively.)

SCOUT: Look, Harry … at the start they’re alive and together, and at the end, even in Ovid, they’re dead. That’s still a tragedy, even if it’s a watered-down tragedy.

WILL (gently): Scout, they’re not together at the start. Eurydice dies at their wedding feast, their marriage is never consummated. To be together with Eurydice, Orpheus has to rescue her from hell by joining her in hell, by dying for her. But is Ovid really talking about physical death?

SECOND BOY: What do you think he’s talking about?

WILL: Emotional hell. Look, at the end of _The Metamorphoses_ Ovid boasts that this book will make him immortal and raise him above the stars. That’s the culminating metamorphosis of _The Metamorphoses_. Obviously, it’s not to be taken literally. The other stories in the book aren’t, either. They’re metaphors for our emotional life, for how we change, how we grow.

SCOUT: So? How does that apply to this story?

WILL: For Ovid, couldn’t hell be a metaphor for emotional isolation – for feeling unloved, even unlovable? Couldn’t the venom that kills Eurydice be emotional poison – whatever makes her feel that way? Couldn’t the death that Orpheus has to suffer to be together with her be letting himself be torn apart emotionally for her, loving her partly because she’s emotionally wounded and isolated?

(A pause. SCOUT stares first at WILL, then at FINN. All three avoid looking at HAMILTON – while MARK looks straight at him, smiling slightly.)

MARK (softly): Well done, Krudski.

(WILL looks at MARK questioningly.)

SCOUT (to FINN): _Mea culpa, stultus sum. Oculos habeo et non video, aures habeo et non audio_.

FINN: You’re not alone, Mr. Calhoun. When the dead come back to life, few of us notice. Maybe we’re already in the Elysian Fields, but would rather not know it. … (He stands, cleans the chalkboard, begins to write something in Latin on it, his back to the class.) … Mr. Fleming, would you care to contribute anything to this discussion?

HAMILTON: Nope. I’ve learned just to read, and let Will interpret. But if I were ever to look back like Orpheus did, I hope my judge would be kinder than Pluto was. If he were, I’d be really grateful.

(SCOUT and WILL look at each other and roll their eyes. MARK looks down at his desk, smiling faintly.)

FINN (turning to face the class again): Personally, I like the ambiguity of having two possible endings. Because myths are really about us, aren’t they? And how well we love one another – that’s one of the things we _can_ change. For better or for worse. … Dr. Hotchkiss’s assignment for next Monday’s on the LAN, gentlemen: read Ovid’s story about Cyparissus …

WILL (apparently having read ahead): Yeh, the wounded deer story.

HAMILTON (rolling his eyes, muttering): Oh god, another wounded deer?

FINN: … and his story about Pygmalion, and be prepared to discuss why they’re inserted into his story about Orpheus. … (Pointing to what he’s written on the chalkboard:) My assignment for you is to think about that - in context of our school motto. It’s from Cicero:

_Et esse gratum et videri;_  
 _haec est enim una virtus non solum maxima,_  
 _sed etiam mater virtutum omnium reliquarum._

That’ll be all for today, gentlemen. Enjoy the holiday.

 

*       *       *


	10. Scene 6 - Stranded is stranded

EXT - TOWN COMMON, GROTTLESEX, MASSACHUSETTS, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

Typical New England town common. Trees, bandstand, Civil War monument, all under foot-deep and still fast-falling snow.

Pan to a general-store-and-filling-station across a not-recently-plowed and largely deserted street from the common. The sidewalk in front of the store is freshly shoveled. Through the shop window, we see a couple of winter-clad men standing at the counter, drinking coffee from paper cups, talking with JENKINS, the shopkeeper, who looks astonishingly like the Rawley GROUNDSKEEPER. Two older men play checkers on a board set atop a barrel near a pot-bellied cast-iron stove. The décor is old-fashioned, the flood well-worn hardwood, the cash register pre-electronic.

JAKE Pratt’s reflection appears in the window. She wears a white down parka, its fur-lined hood pulled up, white snow-pants, white gloves, and snow boots, her red backpack slung over one shoulder. She takes off her gloves, pulls back her hood, revealing unkempt hair several inches longer than at summer session’s end, in early August. Using the window as a mirror, she brushes her hair off her face, rolls her lips to smooth out her lipstick – her only make-up – then pockets her gloves and enters the store.

 

 

INT – GROTTLESEX GENERAL STORE, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

JENKINS: ‘Afternoon, Miss Pratt.

JAKE: Hi, Mr. Jenkins.

JENKINS: Nice weather we’re having.

JAKE (grinning): Yeh.

JENKINS: What can I do for you this fine autumn day?

JAKE: I’ll start with some coffee. After that … (In a pocket, her mobile phone rings – the ringtone the opening bars of Hans Zimmer’s “[True Romance](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiyUf-OZz0U)“ theme.) … Oh, excuse me. … (Pulling out the phone:) Just a small cup, please.

(JAKE walks away from the counter and the checker game toward the front of the store. JENKINS and his two male customers at the counter exchange discreet grins.)

JAKE (looking out the front window): Hi Hammy. What’s up? … Ooh, sounds like good exercise. Builds character, too. And without me there, you must need both. … In your dreams, boy. …

(JAKE turns back to face JENKINS, who is filling a small paper cup on the countertop with coffee.)

JAKE: Oh, just admiring the weather, and celebrating finishing my exams. … Don’t worry, I was motivated – and Anne, Paul and Gordon have been on my case. … By playing with my birthday present from my mom. … Yes, you’ll like it. So wait for it. … When the time is right. What’s new at Rawley? … 

(JAKE shakes her head to decline JENKINS’ offer of sugar.)

JAKE: Yeh, same here at Grottlesex. No one can leave, so break’s shortened. … Funny. What else could they do? …

(JAKE nods to accept JENKINS’ offer of milk.)

JAKE: Of course my mom’s disappointed. So am I. She’s been really sweet lately. And I was looking forward to showing Anne New York. … I know, but even with you staying at Mark's, we were gonna have to spend most of the break apart anyhow. … I wish we could too, boy, but stranded is stranded, ya know? …

(JAKE walks back to the counter, picks up the coffee cup, smiles thanks at JENKINS.)

JAKE (drinking during the pauses): Hamilton, it’s not just us. It’s all of New England. All the prep schools, colleges, universities. Hundreds of thousands of kids. We’ll all get through it. … I miss you too. Everybody OK there? … Say hi to them for me. Including your mom, OK? … No, it’s not weird. … I love you, too. I’ll call you tonight. … Bye. … (To JENKINS, while closing and pocketing her phone:) Good coffee, thanks.

JENKINS: It does the job. How’s the young man whose bike’s in my shed?

JAKE (fishing a dollar out of her pocket and handing it to JENKINS): Not happy.

JENKINS (ringing up the sale on his antique cash register): That much I couldn’t help hearing. … So did you walk here from the prep school for my coffee and conversation? (He hands her some change.)

JAKE (dumping the change into a charity can on the countertop): And to take out my birthday present.

(JENKINS tilts his head quizzically.)

JAKE: The one from my mom.

JENKINS: Ah. … It’s all gassed up and good to go – if you are. (He starts toward the store’s back door.)

JAKE: Great. … (She gulps her coffee, sets down the empty cup, follows JENKINS.)

JENKINS (softly, once out of earshot of the other customers): Sorry. I’d forgotten.

JAKE: Hey, it’s understandable. How many people keep two birthday presents in your shed?

JENKINS (opening the back door): Oh, lots. Every prep school girl I know whose boyfriend bought her motorbike from her for a dollar during her orientation week. (He pushes the storm door open, holds it open for JAKE.)

JAKE (rolling her eyes at JENKINS): That wasn’t quite the whole present. (She goes outside.)

 

 

EXT – GROTTLESEX GENERAL STORE, REAR ALLEY, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

(JAKE stands on a small back porch. A recently-shoveled path leads to the side door of a machine shed, the large cantilevered front door of which fronts on the dead-end of an unplowed alley.)

JENKINS (following JAKE out, closing the store’s back door behind him): Bah … Registering that bike in his name, insuring it, paying me to store it, all so you won’t get into trouble for keeping it at school – that’s not much. Lots of girls have boyfriends like that. (He walks down the porch step toward the shed.)

JAKE (following JENKINS, amused): Do they? And what mine gave me when my birthday came?

JENKINS (walking toward the shed): A one-dollar buyback option?

JAKE: Yeh, framed, notarized, and watermarked with a photo of me in my biker’s helmet?   

JENKINS: Totally ordinary. Buyback options are the new earrings.

JAKE: Uh – huh.

JENKINS (fishing a keychain out of a pocket, unlocking the shed’s side door): But his having me keep that bike locked till you turned sixteen, and your Maine biker's permit became valid in this state – that suggests that, as boyfriends go, yours may be … unusual. … (Opening the door, holding it for her:) Even if he whines a lot.

JAKE: Mr. Jenkins, you have no idea. (She goes inside.)

 

*       *       *


	11. Scene 7 - Birthday presents

INT – GROTTLESEX GENERAL STORE MACHINE SHED, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

(JENKINS, entering by the side door, turns on the light, pockets his keys, holds the door open for JAKE. She follows him inside. Arranged around the shed are various machines: a sit-down power mower, a power lawn edger, a pressure washer, a winch, two chain saws. JAKE’s black motorbike stands near a side wall; above it hangs the framed buy-back option, printed on a faded image of JAKE, in profile, in her biker’s helmet – HAMILTON’s first photograph of her, taken from a window above the front door of Rawley Boys’ on the first day of summer session.  

On the opposite wall of the shed hang a dozen snowshoes, a few snow shovels (one missing), some coils of rope and a large first aid kit. Below them, between a vacant space on the floor and a rack of cross-country skis, two snowmobile skis protrude from under a form-fitting snowmobile cover. JENKINS closes the door, approaches the snowmobile.)

JENKINS: Nice that the snowblowers are out. Makes this easier to get at. (He pulls off the cover, revealing a new white two-seater off-trail-touring snowmobile:

A small winch is mounted on the front of the sled. A high-lift jack is affixed to its side. A snowmobile backpack with a detachable-handle shovel and ice pick lies on the seat. A white helmet is strapped to the rear compartment.)

JENKINS: When Hamilton learns this is yours, will he buy it, too? Or does keeping it here not break your school’s rules?

JAKE (setting her red backpack down on against the ski rack): Not existing rules. But I don’t wanna inspire a new rule. And it’s a small town. So in front of your customers …

JENKINS: It’ll be your “birthday present from your mom”?

JAKE: Thanks. (She pulls a registration sticker out of a pocket.)

JENKINS (hanging the snowmobile cover on a nail in the wall): You’ve driven a snowmobile before?

JAKE: In Maine. My mom has a place there. (She starts to peel off the registration sticker’s plastic fronting.)

JENKINS: But this’ll be your first time out on this Ski-Doo.

JAKE: Can’t sled without snow.

JENKINS: And you think you’re ready to take it out in a blizzard?

JAKE: I’ve had two months to get ready. I’ve got my registration. … (She affixes the registration sticker to the inside of the windshield, near the bottom.  Pocketing the plastic fronting:) And my S.A.M. club trail pass. And my trail maps.

JENKINS: Jacqueline, the trails won’t be groomed till after the snow stops falling.

JAKE (picking up the snowmobile backpack): It’s an off-trail sled.

JENKINS (helping her into the backpack): Even off-trail sleds get stuck.

JAKE (strapping on the backpack): That’s what the shovel, winch and jack are for.

JENKINS: You’ve got GPS on your phone?

JAKE: Came loaded in.

JENKINS: Know how to get your exact longitude and latitude?

JAKE: Of course.

JENKINS: Show me.

(JAKE rolls her eyes, pulls out her mobile phone, fiddles with it, holds the screen up to JENKIN’s face.)

JENKINS: Good. Now show me how much charge you’ve got left in that phone.

(JAKE again fiddles with her phone and holds it up for JENKINS’ inspection.)

JENKINS: That’ll do. … (He takes a business card out of a pocket. Handing it to JAKE:) Now program my cell phone number into your phone and text me yours.

(JAKE fiddles with her phone yet again, for a longer time. From inside JENKINS’ shirt pocket, his mobile phone rings. She pockets her phone and his card. He pulls out his phone, fiddles with it briefly, re-pockets it.)

JAKE: Happy now?

JENKINS: Enough to let you take the sled out. Sorry I can’t cart it to the trailhead. My son’s out plowing with my truck. But you can sled to the trail on the back streets. Most of them aren't plowed enough for cars.

JAKE: I’ll manage.

JENKINS: Have fun, Jacqueline. Call me if you need me. But don’t go far, and be back before dark.

JAKE: Thanks, I will.

JENKINS: And if you don’t have a better offer … Mrs. Jenkins and I would welcome your company for Thanksgiving dinner. We live above the store.

JAKE (moved): Mr. Jenkins, thank you. But I’ve already accepted a Thanksgiving dinner invitation – from Hamilton’s parents, in New Rawley. I plan to be there. That’s why I’m taking the sled out – to practice.

JENKINS: But from what you said on the phone … Hamilton isn’t expecting you.

JAKE: His parents wanna surprise him. Kinda weird, but I can’t say no. And I talked my mom into letting me go.

JENKINS (running a hand through his thinning hair): Jacqueline, I can’t let you sled fifty miles, alone, in this weather. And I can’t believe that Hamilton’s parents or your mom would want you to. Have you told them you plan to do this?

JAKE: I phoned my mom and e-mailed Hamilton’s last night. And as I told them, I’ll go with my roommate, not alone. And not until Thursday – it’s supposed to clear up by then. We’ll take bivvy bags, just in case. And tomorrow we’ll practice sledding near here – including using the winch and jack.

JENKINS: So it’s not suicidal, just dangerous. … Know anyone in New Rawley who can help you, if you get into trouble closer to there than to here?

JAKE: A friend of mine works at a service station. Her dad runs it. They know we’re coming. And by Sunday, when we come back, the trails will be groomed.

JENKINS: And how do you plan to leave for four days without letting your school know about your sled?

JAKE: Anne and I are on break, so we don’t need permission to leave. But we’ll tack a note on our door, with our cell phone numbers on it, saying we’re headed to New Rawley.

JENKINS: And when they phone you, and ask where you are and how you got there, what will you say?

JAKE: That we’ve rented cross-country skis from you. … (Pulling out a money clip of hundred-dollar bills:) How much to rent two pair of skis, with boots, bindings and poles, from now through Sunday?

JENKINS: Ninety bucks plus tax per set – and you can keep them for ten days, same price.

JAKE (offering two C-notes to JENKINS): Put the change in your charity can. And please write me a receipt. I may want it. Security deposit?

JENKINS (not taking the money): Not necessary. But what do you plan to do with the skis?

JAKE: Leave them here, if you let me take the sled to New Rawley. Know any kids who might enjoy using them?

JENKINS: Lots.

JAKE (still holding out the money): Then please invite them to do that. But if you won’t let me take the sled, then Anne and I will ski to New Rawley.

JENKINS (after a pause): That’d take two days. And you’d need to rest.

JAKE: I know. If we have to ski, we’ll leave tomorrow morning. But it’s safe. We’ll ski on the roads, try to hitch rides on any plowed stretches. There are motels, and they’ll have vacancies. And we’ll bus back Sunday. … So are we going by sled or by ski?

JENKINS: I don’t suppose I can talk you out of this?

JAKE: Not a chance. The skis are safe.

JENKINS: You’ll get there stiff, aching, and blistered. If you get there at all.

JAKE: We’ll get there. But that we might give up at a motel half-way there is not a safety issue.

JENKINS (sighing): You know I can’t make two young girls ski fifty miles instead of sledding. That’s …

JAKE: “Just not done.“

JENKINS: Yes. … Isn’t being blackmailed supposed to cost me money, not make me money?

JAKE (casting a quick glance at the framed buy-back option): I learned irony from the best.

JENKINS (his eyes following hers): You did. … So what’s with his whining?

JAKE: Part of his act. I get to play the consoler, instead of feeling sorry for myself.

JENKINS: And it works, even though you see through it?

JAKE: _What_ I see through it is that I’m loved. That’s consoling.

JENKINS (smiling slightly): Alright, you can take the sled. If you’ll listen to some advice.

JAKE: Thanks. I’m listening.

JENKINS (taking and pocketing the money): On Sunday, you should be OK. But Thursday, allow six hours for the trip. And forget everything you’ve read about staying on the trails. Use unplowed back roads as much as you can. And don't trust the ice to cross streams. Use the bridges, plowed or not.

JAKE: Sledding on roads is illegal. Half a mile to the trailhead is one thing. Fifty miles is another.

JENKINS: It’s illegal to keep you out of the way of cars. On roads cars can't use, you won't be in their way.

JAKE: And how is an unplowed road better than an ungroomed trail?

JENKINS: For one thing, you’re less likely to freeze. People are more likely to live nearby, and a plow will come eventually. For another, the roads are flatter. Slopes and depressions are where you’ll get stuck. 

JAKE: And if I’m on an unplowed road, and it turns into a plowed one, someplace where there’s no trailhead nearby? 

JENKINS: Keep going. The cars won’t be moving fast. If you’re stopped, the worst that can happen is that you lose your registration, and have to sell your sled to your boyfriend for a dollar. Beats getting frostbite or leaving your sled buried in the woods.

JAKE: Good point.

JENKINS: And if you _are_ stopped, tell the truth. Even if they give you a ticket, the cops will help you get to New Rawley.

JAKE: Hope you’re right.

JENKINS: Jacqueline, you’re a sixteen-year-old girl sledding to Thanksgiving dinner with her boyfriend’s family. People will help you. And cops are people. Take your chances with them, not with the winter.

JAKE (after a pause): You think the Grottlesex cops might bend the rules a little, like, before I leave?

JENKINS: For a good reason. Have one?

JAKE: Maybe. Have any customers who live alone outside town – and whose Thanksgiving prospects look kinda bleak?

JENKINS: Several.

JAKE: Tomorrow afternoon – after we’d practiced getting out of snowdrifts – Anne and I could deliver some groceries for you. Or if someone would rather come into town to be with family or friends, this sled’s rear seat has a strap and a backrest. Even someone feeble should be OK.

JENKINS: Thank you. I’ll make some phone calls, then walk over to the police station. And I may have some snowblowing to do. My wife may be behind the counter when you come back - but she'll have your receipt.

JAKE (unstrapping the helmet from the rear seat): I’ll see you tomorrow, then.

JENKINS (raising the cantilever door): I doubt it. It’ll be my turn to go out plowing. My son’ll mind the store. But I expect he’ll have some deliveries for you.

JAKE (putting on her gloves): Thursday morning, before ten, when we come by to pick up the sled?

JENKINS (pushing the sled outside): We’ll be at church. But I’ll leave the shed unlocked.

JAKE: Happy Thanksgiving, then, Mr. Jenkins.

JENKINS: Happy Thanksgiving, Jacqueline. … But on Thursday and Sunday, you keep that cell phone charged. If you have trouble closer to here than to New Rawley, call me. And if I haven’t heard from you by sundown either day, and can’t reach you by phone, I’m calling out the reserves, understood?

JAKE (kissing him on the cheek): You’re a dear. (She puts on her helmet, visor raised.)

JENKINS: I’m sane. Give my regards to Hamilton. And tell him I want to talk with him, please.

JAKE (seating herself on the snowmobile): About his crazy girlfriend?

JENKINS: And why she’s no longer at his school. Till now, that was none of my business. But when you start using stuff you rent from me, or store with me, to do things almost too dangerous to let you do, in order to be with him – then it becomes my business. You can’t do this for four years, Jacqueline. If you two want to be together, this is not the way to do it.

JAKE (starting the ignition): Believe me, Mr. Jenkins, we know.

(JAKE lowers her visor, throttles the sled, and drives off down the alley, waving goodbye with the back of a white-gloved hand.)

 

*       *       *


	12. Scene 8 - Facilior decensus Averno

EXT – NEW RAWLEY INN, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

Establishing shot. Another typical New England town common – greensward, trees, bandstand, Civil War Memorial – all buried a foot deep in still heavily-falling snow. On one side of the common is a colonial-era Congregationalist church. On another, the town hall, an imposing Federal-style structure. On the third, one edge of the business district, including Fanny’s, a down-market seafood restaurant, and an old general store now serving as a café and bakery. On the fourth side, between the common and the lake, is a typical New England inn, a two story-building, Federal style – white clapboard with green shutters, like the church and town hall – with a large but discreetly tree-concealed modern annex in the rear. It’s the New Rawley town common (not shown in the original drama because that, albeit set in Massachusetts, was filmed in Maryland, where towns don’t have commons).

The camera pans in on the New Rawley Inn, focusing on its signboard, hung projecting outward over the door, which bears the inn’s name, the year it opened – 1809 – and its symbol, the same book-and-crowns seen on the Rawley seal. In token of the season, three diversely colored ears of maize, bound together, hang on the front door.

 

 

INT – NEW RAWLEY INN, JACUZZI, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

(A single large, meter-deep whirlpool – deep enough for guys to stand up in without embarrassment –nearly fills a small sunroom with a view of the lake, barely visible in the falling snow, through a single-pane one-way window that extends to the floor. A gas-flame fireplace opposite the window is cold.

 

[The whirlpool shown above really is in a hotel in a small rural Massachusetts town – the Cranwell, in Lenox.] Three towels hang on pegs near the door. WILL, HAMILTON and MARK, hair wet, presumably from having just showered, are settling into the tub, lazing about in the center.)

MARK: The inn’s really dead today.

WILL: Yeh, hurtin’ bad. Stuck all week with their Monday-before-Thanksgiving bookings.

MARK: And of those, just the guests who didn’t mind being stranded here.

(SCOUT, in spa robe and rubber sandals, hair wet, hobbles in from the door, which closes behind him.)

SCOUT: How’s the pool?

WILL: Almost as sweet as the one at your beach house on St. Martin.

SCOUT (stiffly scraping off his sandals on the floor beneath the towels): This one’s larger.

WILL: That one was … better decorated. … (To HAMILTON and MARK:) No offense, guys.

MARK: None taken. But this one’s jake.

HAMILTON: Funny.

MARK (shrugging): The adjective seems apt. This pool’s warm, soft and wet, and you’re in it … Ow!

HAMILTON (growling gently, having just done something painful to MARK under the water): Behave …

(SCOUT and WILL exchange surprised, questioning glances.)

MARK: So, Scout, your dad’s fond of these things?

SCOUT (limping to the edge of the pool): Yeh. He has a lifetime family membership here.

(SCOUT lets fall his robe. Our ever-discreet camera focuses on the robe, not on SCOUT, once the two part. The robe clunks a bit heavily as it falls. A splash indicates that SCOUT has hopped in rather than use the stairs.)

WILL: A lifetime family membership …

SCOUT (turning to fold the robe): Dad’s in town pretty often. And the Inn has the only spa in town.

WILL: Yeh, I know. It’s my town.

SCOUT: I’ve held off on using it, but we’ve earned it today.

(SCOUT settles back against the pool wall near his robe, sitting on the half-meter-high ledge around the edge of the pool. WILL edges to the opposite side of the pool. HAMILTON and MARK exchange faint smiles and remain in the center.)

HAMILTON: We have. Thanks again, guys, for helping me shovel out Dr. Hotchkiss.

SCOUT: Our pleasure, Ham. A really neat old guy. I’d never talked with him much outside class before.

WILL: You should, Scout. He’s a real scholar. … And he’s very fond of you, Ham.

MARK (playfully, paddling about in the center with HAMILTON): _De gustibus non est disputandum_.

HAMILTON (to WILL, after smiling briefly at MARK): He’s tutored me for years, and not just in Latin. He’s my godfather – went to school with my dad’s dad, who died years ago. My other granddad spends most of his time in Europe. Dr. Hotchkiss has sort of filled the gap. … He’s been here half a century.

SCOUT: Yeh … And he never forgets. … (Mimicking the Latin teacher’s aged voice:) “Some future senators seem to feel obliged to cram a lifetime’s worth of misbehavior into four years at prep school, Mr. Calhoun. Do you?”

WILL: His comments about chaperoning the summer cotillion were interesting, too, Ham. Perhaps we might discuss those sometime.

HAMILTON (with studied casualness): We can discuss them now, if you like, Will. … Mark knows.

WILL: Duh! “Warm, soft and wet”? Scout and I sorta gathered that. So you’ve told Harry.

MARK (softly): No, Will. Ham really is a Swiss vault. He’s told no one. Jacqueline told me. (He moves to the edge, halfway between SCOUT and WILL, leaving HAMILTON alone in the center.)

SCOUT (a hint of jealousy showing): Really? When?

HAMILTON: Mark knew before I did.

SCOUT (to WILL): Well … that could explain a lot.

WILL: Yeh, it could. Like …

(A knock on the door.)

SCOUT: Come in.

(An attractive young waitress, JENNIFER Langtree - her first name embossed on a badge pinned to her uniform - enters with a tray of four mugs. She politely avoids ogling the male flesh. The mugs display the sign of the inn – the book-and-crowns.)

SCOUT: Oh, thanks. Just set that down over here by me, would you please?

WILL (as the waitress complies with SCOUT’s request): Hi, Jenny.

JENNIFER (surprised, blushing): Will! Hi … Sorry, I, uh … didn’t see you.

WILL: Jen, this is …

JENNIFER: Will, please. If you want to introduce me to your friends, do it when they’re dressed. … Enjoy your drinks, gentlemen. (She allows herself a brief look at the guys, smiles appreciatively, leaves.)

WILL (blushing, as the door closes behind JENNIFER): Sorry.

(HAMILTON and MARK burst out laughing, swim to either side of WILL.)

SCOUT: Will, it’s OK. There’s no place I’d wouldn’t be proud to take you. You don’t make the same mistake twice, and that’s all anybody asks. (He turns around, digs a metal pocket flask out of his robe pocket, pours a little of its contents into each of the mugs, hides it back inside the pocket, stirs.)

MARK (to WILL, brushing WILL’s wet hair off his forehead): It’s like learning a language, man. You learn by making embarrassing mistakes. _Et tu le fais très bien_.

WILL: _C’est vrai_?

HAMILTON (briefly clasping WILL’s shoulder): _Mieux que bien, mec_.

SCOUT (crossing the pool with two mugs): You should have heard him on St. Martin. Picked it up really fast.

WILL: Only because you found us some willing teachers.

SCOUT (laughing): Yeh, I found them. I know the place. But it wasn’t me that made yours willing, buddy. … (Handing the mugs to MARK and HAMILTON:) Hot toddies, brandy.

HAMILTON: Thanks. I didn’t know this place let you drink in the pool.

SCOUT: There are few problems in a nearly empty hotel that money cannot solve.

MARK: Scout, you’re a prince.

SCOUT (re-crossing the pool to fetch the remaining two mugs): That’s uncomfortably close to being literally true, Harry. Why don’t you just say you’re hopelessly indebted to me?

MARK (laughing): Very well, I am.

SCOUT (picking up the last two mugs): Hold that thought. … (Crossing the pool with the mugs:) Look, Will … Harry, Ham and I will introduce ourselves to Jennifer on the way out. And if you’d like her to meet more Rawley guys, invite her to our next school dance. That will make it all good, OK?

WILL: Really?

HAMILTON: Really. You were trying to be kind, Will. We all know that, so does Jen. You just need to learn how to do it in unfamiliar circumstances.

MARK: And some good may yet come of it. So cheer up.

WILL: Thanks, guys.

SCOUT: (Handing Will a mug and lifting his own): To Jennifer: May all our mistakes be so pleasant!

HAMILTON and MARK: To Jennifer!

WILL: Yeh … to Jen.

(All four boys drink. SCOUT settles onto the pool ledge opposite WILL. HAMILTON and MARK disengage from WILL and sit on the ledge opposite each other midway between SCOUT and WILL.)

SCOUT: So Johnson, how about paying your debt to me?

MARK: What do you have in mind?

SCOUT: Well, your first-born child might be worth two drinks. And I’ve already struck out with the only sister you’ve got …

MARK: When I spoke with Liz today, she asked about you … as always.

SCOUT: Mmmm … So how about answering some questions? I’m a little unclear … about a lot of things.

MARK: Shoot.

SCOUT: You know, of course, that because you’ve hung out with Fleming all this term, ever since you started coxing our boat, nearly everyone here thinks you’re gay, too – waiting to snap Ham up when Jake finally dumps him, or he gets tired of chasing Jake. … Or maybe not waiting …

MARK: Some people think the strangest things, don’t they?

SCOUT: They do when they’re misled. Of course, Will and I’ve known that Pratt’s a girl, that she and Ham are in love, and that Ham would never deliberately break a gay guy’s heart. And I’ve had reason to think you’re not gay, even before today.

MARK: You mean my twin sister’s assurances? Her faith in me’s a consolation.

SCOUT: Don’t kid yourself, Johnson. Liz welcomed my assurances that it’s not what it looks like. Sadly, I’m not sure she believed me. I wasn’t free to tell her all I know, and there’s a lot I don’t know.

MARK (shaken, looking at HAMILTON): Liz has never asked about it.

SCOUT: Because she’ll love you no matter who you bed, and doesn’t want you to think otherwise.

MARK: Oh …

SCOUT: Harry, the charade hurts people and puts people at risk. People who care about Jake and Ham, like Lena and Ham’s parents. People who care about you, too, now that you’re part of it. So why are you? What good is gonna come from this?

MARK: I’m in it for love, Scout. Partly of Jacqueline and Ham. But I’ve got another reason, too.

SCOUT: Would that reason happen to be about five-foot-ten, lithe, athletic-looking, angular features, light auburn hair?

(MARK looks at HAMILTON, who shrugs.)

MARK: Yeh, it would. You’ve seen me with her?

SCOUT: Twice, and Will once, during the past few weeks. Always on weekends. I saw you together here at the Inn at Homecoming weekend, when my dad was here. And Will and I’ve seen you two visiting Bella at the gas station, during our shifts at the diner – like last Saturday. Stunning girl, Harry.

MARK (to HAMILTON): Classmates who spend half their time in town do make discretion difficult.

SCOUT: She doesn’t go to Rawley Girls’. And neither Will nor the regulars at the diner recognized her, so she must be from out of town. Obviously, when she’s in town, she stays at the Inn, and you with her.

WILL: Somewhere in town. But here at the Inn? I mean, she’s gotta be under eighteen, and so’s Harry.

SCOUT: Will, it’s not illegal for hotels to rent rooms to minors. The problem’s just that contracts with minors aren’t enforceable. But with advance payment and a security deposit, or a parent or trust fund manager co-signing, all things are possible. Especially at an independent hotel and for a regular guest from a known family. And since the age of consent here in Massachusetts is sixteen …

WILL (rolling his eyes): Got it.

SCOUT: But Harry, you hadn’t known Bella before. So your out-of-town girlfriend must know her. How, neither Will nor I could imagine, until a few minutes ago. But if you’ve known Jacqueline was a girl since early last summer, then I’d guess your girlfriend knows Bella through Jacqueline.

WILL: Uh - huh. And that she’s from Grottlesex.

SCOUT: You know, Harry – Will and I’ve bused up to Grottlesex on a Sunday to visit Jacqueline, then bused back here with Ham, three times. The first time, in September, she had a roommate, Sally, who was a bit too straight-laced – made Ham sleep on some guys’ floor. But that didn’t last long. Remember why, Will?

WILL: Kinda unforgettable. Poor Sally walked into their room one afternoon and found Jacqueline staging an in-drag display of affection with another girl. Blazer, tie, slacks, binder … Jacqueline said Sally jumped at the chance to trade rooms with that other girl that same night.

SCOUT: And Jacqueline really seems to like her new roommate. Rows stroke in the boat Jacqueline coxes. But regrettably, Will and I’ve never met her.

WILL: She was gone both the last two times we were at Grottlesex. “Visiting her boyfriend at another school,” Jacqueline said.

SCOUT: Anne, wasn’t it, Will?

WILL: Yeh. From Northern California. Recall Anne’s last name, Scout?

SCOUT: I don’t think we got it. Wanna help us out with that, Johnson?

MARK: Crompton. Anne Crompton. … Who said all the cute ones are dumb, Ham?

HAMILTON: Hey, not me, guy.

WILL: So, uh, … you two, Jacqueline and Anne …

SCOUT: Easy there, Will. We could catch a crab on this stretch.

WILL: How do you suggest we take it?

SCOUT: I don’t. Let it run.

HAMILTON: You scared of catching crabs, Mark?

MARK: Not the kind they’re talking about.

HAMILTON (sipping his drink): Scout, Will – what were their names, those French girls you hung out with on St. Martin in August?

WILL: Michèle and Denise.

MARK: Close friends?

SCOUT: Schoolmates on holiday, like us.

HAMILTON: It’s wonderful, isn’t it, Mark, how being with girls who are close friends can make two guys who are close friends even closer? A bit more than friends?

MARK: Mmmm, especially if they’re spending their days together on a topless beach, and their nights in a beach house they have all to themselves. For four whole weeks, with an ocean view, a hot tub, a private pool, king-size beds, and no schoolwork. Much nicer than a couple of mid-term weekends in a school dorm, on two cot mattresses pushed together on the floor.

SCOUT (after exchanging a wry smile with WILL): Will and I’d have traded mattress quality for a future. We’re happy for you both.

WILL: And sadly, we were with Michèle and Denise for only two weeks. Their break ended even before we flew back early to spend a few days around Scout's birthday with his family. And it took us a week to find them.

SCOUT: Yeh, whose fault was that?

WILL: Mine, largely. I needed to write. But the research …

MARK: Research? On holiday in the islands? That’s a bit much even for you, Krudski.

WILL: Yes, research. Scout and I had just learned Jake’s a girl, and she and Ham had just told us their story, the day we left for St. Martin. So when we got there, we tried to figure out what "true love" is, and what “straight” and “gay” mean - if they mean anything at all. And Scout, you were …

SCOUT: As into that as you were, yes. Ever read the Kinsey reports, Ham? We found a lot about them online.

HAMILTON: Anne recommended them to me. They helped.

SCOUT: A sexologist! Harry, you lucky dog! And yes, they do help.

WILL: Less than Plato’s _Symposium_. Or Xenophon’s. Or Plutarch ...

MARK: Or what Ham’s done for Jacqueline.

SCOUT (muttering): Yeh … _Facilior descensus Averno_.

(WILL, HAMILTON, and MARK shoot questioning looks at SCOUT.)

SCOUT: I just mean that what Ham’s done has made a lot of things easier to justify. Maybe too easy. His going for Jake, even though he thought she was a guy, was the right thing to do. If he hadn’t …

WILL: Yeh, we all saw the only poster she hung in her room here, the one for Primal Scream’s “[Vanishing Point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_Point_\(Primal_Scream_album\)).”

    

And we all know what it celebrates - [turning yourself into road kill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_Point_\(1971_film\)). Taken together with her motorcycle, and the rest of the crap she was doing, damned disturbing.

SCOUT: And that kinda blows away a few rules. The more you think about it, the more rules it trashes. But our rules help us not do dumb, dangerous stuff like fall in love with your half-sister, or half in love with your roommate. I’m still trying to figure it all out.

HAMILTON: So am I, guy, believe me.

WILL: Scout, there’s only one rule that has no exceptions. The others are just there to help us apply that one. Sometimes we have to break them.

MARK: And sometimes you find out why rules are there by breaking them. In ways you might not expect. Like finding out that you feel closer to another guy you love when you both make love to your girls together than when you make love to each other.

WILL: You guys too? I mean, preferring girls, that’s one thing. Preferring girls, even as a way of bonding with another guy, that’s … something else.

SCOUT: That guys love one another best by loving their girls well, and helping one another do that – hardly a new thought, is it?

HAMILTON: It’s one you and Will clearly understand. You love each other too much to risk falling in love, to be lovers when you don’t have girls.

WILL: That obvious?

MARK: A wistful sadness in the eyes, and at the corners of the mouth, whenever you’re together - even when you flirt.

HAMILTON: If Jacqueline and Anne were to disappear, Mark and I might be doing just what you guys are doing – flirting for emotional support, and not much else. But it looks tough.

MARK: Yeh, taking mostly the same classes, rowing in the same shell, sleeping in the same room …

SCOUT: Less tough than being alone. … But you and Harry pretty clearly _are_ lovers.

HAMILTON (amused, looking sidelong at MARK): That obvious?

WILL: A playful tenderness in the eyes, and at the corners of the mouth, so that whenever you’re together, you’re flirting, even when you don’t mean to.

SCOUT: Yeh. But you guys have let Will and me see more of that than other people, because we know about Jacqueline, haven’t you?

HAMILTON: Sorry. It gets a little lonely.

SCOUT: Tell me about it. Will and I have done the same to you two, ‘cause you both clearly know what it’s like to be straight but, uh …

MARK: Drawn to a guy you’re close to emotionally?

WILL: Yeh. Still, it’s not quite the same. Scout and I didn’t seem to be betraying any girls. And we both really like Jacqueline. We’ve worried.

MARK: You didn’t really think Ham was betraying her … with me?

SCOUT: Well, reconciling what we saw you guys doing with what we knew about Ham and Jacqueline seemed impossible. But …

WILL: We’re kinda used to Hamilton’s being better than seems possible.

MARK: You still have no clue how much. But saying so to his face could make him insufferable, so let’s put it in perspective. The guy I take care of for Jacqueline during the week is the same dork who kept an emotionally desperate girl in drag waiting a month last summer while he dithered about being gay. And what we’ve got now is all Jackie’s doing, not his.

HAMILTON: Hey, I was gonna talk with Jake about getting you together with Anne.

MARK: While you were still thinking about it, she’d already done it, Fleming. You’re as slow as molasses. You brood till someone lights a fire under your ass. The rest of us could all die waiting for you to decide to love us.

SCOUT (laughing): You, Johnson, I have underestimated. Won’t happen again. … So what shall Will and I call you? You asked us all to call you by your middle name, “Harry,” when you came up, didn’t you?

MARK: I did. My dad’s named Mark, too, and …

SCOUT: I recall. But Fleming’s taken to calling you “Mark.”

WILL: Did Ham find “a little touch of Harry in the night” … a bit much?

HAMILTON (softly, looking at MARK): No. There was a time when I still called him Harry and could hardly bear not to touch him.

MARK: But Jackie’s called me “Mark” in private since last June. I suggested it, to help me remember to call her “Jake” in public, when she called me “Harry.” It’s as “Mark” that she introduced me to Anne.

HAMILTON: So when Harry and I first shared a bed, there were two girls in it calling him “Mark.” I didn’t fight it.

MARK: I’ve come to like “Mark.” Can’t imagine why. Feel free to call me that, if you like.

SCOUT (amused): “Mark” it is, then.

WILL (playfully): Hi, Mark.

(MARK glances at HAMILTON, who laughs and nods his head. MARK swims over to WILL, brushes his nose against WILL’s neck:) Hi, Will.

WILL (softly, nuzzling back): Trust me?

MARK: Of course.

WILL: Then stay. We’ll both want the company.

MARK: OK, I’ll fetch my drink. (He re-crosses the pool.)

WILL: So Mark, you talk about the Calhouns’ beach house on St. Martin as if you’ve been there. Have you?

MARK (returning with his mug): No, regrettably. But Ham has, of course. And we talk.

WILL (slowly, looking first at HAMILTON, then at SCOUT): Yes, of course Hamilton’s been there. More than once, I’ve heard.

(SCOUT and HAMILTON exchange first looks of trepidation, then nods of assent.)

HAMILTON: Go ahead, Will. Push it out … just … gently, please.

MARK (to WILL, taking a seat on the ledge beside him): What’s this about?

WILL: Mark, I’m not supposed to know that Ham’s ever been to St. Martin. In fact, I’m not supposed to know that he and Scout knew each other before the start of summer term.

MARK: You’ve gotta be kidding. Everyone at Rawley knows that the Calhouns pretty much choose this school’s dean, and that Ham's dad and Scout’s have been friends since college. Basically, Steven Fleming is Dean because John Calhoun is Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

WILL: Yes, everyone does know that, now. But last summer I didn’t. And I’ve pretended for months that I still don’t know. Wanna tell Mark why that is, Scout?

SCOUT (chagrinned): The first day of summer session, Ham and I were dumb enough to introduce ourselves to each other, in front of Will, as if we were total strangers.

MARK (to HAMILTON): And why did you two geniuses … oh crap. … Look, I don’t need to know. (He stands, sets down his drink, starts toward the stairs.)

HAMILTON: I’d like you to know, Mark.

WILL (grabbing MARK’s wrist): And I need you to. I need your help. So do they. Stay, please.

MARK (stopping, turning): Fleming, this really sucks. Not that it happened. That you never told me.

WILL (releasing MARK’s wrist): Scout never told me, either. Neither he nor Ham could have told either of us till now.

MARK (still glaring at HAMILTON): Why not?

WILL: Ham couldn’t tell you alone. And Scout couldn’t tell me alone. They'd both have to be here for it, right?

MARK: Right. So?

WILL: Ham couldn’t ask Scout to help him tell you without telling Scout why Ham wanted you to know. And Scout couldn’t ask Ham to help him tell me without telling Ham why Scout wanted me to know. They couldn’t be honest with us about each other until they’d been honest with each other about us. They only did that just now. Get it?

MARK (calming): So this is their first opportunity … because of us.

WILL: Right. And as you just saw, when I suggested they seize it … letting them know I already knew …

MARK (sitting back down beside WILL): They agreed … for me. Thanks, Will. I owe you.

WILL (flirtatiously): Easily repaid.

MARK: Oh? How?

WILL: Stop hiding your girl, jerk. Next time Anne’s in town, take her and Bella and me out somewhere.

MARK (amused): Done. … (To SCOUT:) Your guy has a way of putting things in perspective, Calhoun.

SCOUT: He does.

MARK: Alright … When did it happen, Ham?

HAMILTON: Three summers back, in August, when I'd just turned fourteen and Scout was about to. Afterwards, I wigged out.

SCOUT: We both wigged out.

HAMILTON: Yeh, but I ran. You'd have wound it down and built on it if I’d let you. … (To MARK:) Anyhow, Scout and I avoided each other for almost two years, after having been close all our lives. When we met again, last June, we weren’t prepared to deal with that in front of a guy we didn’t know.

WILL: But they both knew I was the townie scholarship kid, an outsider who didn’t know what everybody else knows. Of course, once I learned what everybody knows, why they’d done what they’d done was as clear to me as it was just now to you. Why else would two really nice guys who’d been close all their lives pretend to be strangers when they met here, in front of me?

MARK: Yeh. Sometimes the cute ones really are dumb. So you’ve pretended not to know in order to avoid forcing the issue, until they were ready?

WILL: And until you were here to help. … Mark, I think what’s bugging Scout is that the way Ham’s trying to bring Jacqueline back here seems to put their dads and their dads’ friendship at risk, and that puts their own friendship at risk. Scout’s lost Ham once, Mark, he doesn’t want to lose him again, and he doesn’t understand what Ham’s up to. And Ham must hate putting Scout through that.

MARK: They still love each other.

WILL: They always have, all their lives. The problem is, they’re doing it badly. Partly ‘cause you and I have been worse than useless. We’ve been in the way.

MARK (putting an arm around WILL): Well, that ends now. … So, Ham, this sheds light on why you wanted so desperately to be totally straight last summer, doesn’t it? Why it took you a month to respond to “Jake”?

SCOUT: Yeh … I screwed Hamilton up … in a way that ended up hurting Jacqueline.

WILL: Scout, you gave him what he gave up for her. If Ham hadn’t been so insanely scared of being gay, there’d have been no sacrifice. He wouldn’t have been able to give Jacqueline what she needed – proof that she’s truly loved.

SCOUT: But I didn’t intend any of that.

WILL: You didn’t intend to screw Ham up, or to hurt Jacqueline, either. You didn’t intend anything, except to let Ham feel how much he means to you.

SCOUT: Thanks, Will. You’re …

WILL: A dolt - really. If I had half the brains a scholarship kid is supposed to have, I’d have figured all this out for myself last summer. I mean, how could the Dean’s son, who’s lived here all his life, never have met a guy his own age from the family that are this school’s biggest donors?

MARK: Yeh, a guy whose alumnus dad gave the welcoming speech at the summer regatta on parents’ weekend without benefit of introduction.

WILL: Right. A guy who already knew his way around this place when we got here …

MARK: Because he’d come here so often with his dad.

WILL: Yeh. That Scout and Ham didn’t know each other was incredible. And their introduction act was so bogus. Scout acted as if the name, “Fleming,” didn’t even ring a bell. And Ham acted as if the name, “Calhoun,” meant nothing to him. No questions like, “Any relation to the Dean?” or “Calhoun, as in Calhoun Hall?” I should have seen through it right away. But I never questioned it.

MARK (looking at HAMILTON): There are worse faults than trust. … (Looking back at WILL): But if you didn’t figure it out, how did you learn … what everyone else already knew?

WILL (looking sheepishly at SCOUT): Dean Fleming told me, in September. … Scout, after you and I got back from St. Martin, I noticed there’s a Calhoun on the board of the foundation that had so miraculously re-funded my scholarship. Turned out to be one of your uncles. I thought you’d meddled, so …

SCOUT (appalled): You went to see the Dean. … You were going to leave Rawley.

WILL (nodding): For Edmund, till I could get my scholarship refunded honestly. The McGrails offered to take me in … knowing that my dad and I can’t live with each other.

SCOUT (softly): Will, I didn’t …

WILL: I know, Scout. The Dean explained that he that had meddled, not you. That he’s Dean because he’s been close to your family since he and your dad roomed, and rowed, and majored in government together at Harvard. That your family recruited him to teach here while he was still writing his dissertation.

SCOUT (softly, deliberately, avoiding eye contact): Will, never leave me without talking to me first.

WILL: Sorry. My dumb townie pride. It’s hard to get over.

SCOUT: Not good enough.

WILL: It won’t happen again.

SCOUT (making eye contact): Thank you.

HAMILTON (plainly trying to diffuse the tension): So, Will, what else did my dad tell you?

WILL: That he and Scout’s dad were each best man at the other’s wedding. That your families get together for a week once or twice every summer, at your cottage on the Vineyard or at the Calhoun compound on the Cape. And for a few days around New Year’s, either here or at Scout’s home in Greenwich. And sometimes during spring break on St. Martin. That you and Scout were beach buddies, and built snowmen together.

HAMILTON: But you had the presence of mind not to mention that Scout and I had pretended not to know each other. Otherwise I’d have heard about that. Impressive.

WILL: Not really. Your dad can be … kinda talkative. By the time I had a chance to mention what I’d seen, he’d given me enough time to figure out that I shouldn’t.

SCOUT: Thanks. You think he knew … why Hamilton spent the summer before last in Europe? And why I spent the last two New Year’s Days on St. Martin?

WILL: Each of you might have done that anyhow. Stop beating yourselves up. Ham’s so into art and architecture, and you’re so into sex …

SCOUT: Excuse me?

WILL: Scout – Ham and I, and Mark’s twin sister, all _know_ you. … (To MARK:) Not that twins talk about things like that, of course.

MARK: Of course not. But Liz did seem a bit short of sleep.

HAMILTON: Will, it’s just that Scout doesn’t have much time …

WILL: Before he’s trapped in the gilded cage of being heir to a progressive political dynasty, imprisoned in an oxymoron?

HAMILTON: Do oxymorons have bars and locks, Scout?

WILL: Funny. News flash: he already is trapped. So many hopes could ride on him someday … To jeopardize that, or even to waste his time … (Mocking the preppy idiom:) That just won’t do, will it?

SCOUT: Will, spare me the pity. Sex is great, but so is purpose. There must be some way for me to have both. I just haven’t found it yet. A girl who shares the purpose, I suppose.

MARK: Liz shares the purpose. It wasn’t enough. Maybe one who personifies the purpose …

HAMILTON: One with nothing to lose.

WILL: One who needs your love as desperately as Jake needed Hamilton’s. ‘Cause you’re as much an emotional saviour type as Ham is, Scout. I know. You saved me, when I first got here.

SCOUT (amused): And when I find this desperately needy girl, what do I give up for her as proof of my love? I mean, if she happens not to be in drag?

WILL (cheerily): Oh, that’s easy. What you like best – sex.

SCOUT: _That_ , Krudski, is an oxymoron.

WILL: Maybe. … But to get back to your question – if the Dean knew what happened between you and Ham, I doubt he’d have told me, so candidly, that you two grew up close.

SCOUT: Good point.

WILL: Still, he did seem to sense that something was wrong between Ham and you. He asked whether you were well, told me how fond he is of you, regretted he hadn’t seen more of you last summer. He stopped just short of wondering out loud why Ham had never had you over to his house.

SCOUT: Well, last summer I thought Ham was gay – and that maybe that was my fault. But I’ve been no stranger to the Flemings’ house this term.

MARK: So Ham, does Jackie know?

HAMILTON: Yes. Since the last weekend in October, the second time Will and Scout visited Grottlesex. … Will, you remember that tour of the Grottlesex library’s rare book room that we arranged for you?

WILL: Yeh, it was great. The early New England poetry collection was … oh …

HAMILTON: Sorry, guy.

MARK: And?

SCOUT: Jacqueline kissed me, told Ham and me to make it right between us, and suggested I bring Liz to Grottlesex soon.

MARK (pleased): Really? Jackie wanted to tell Liz? Even though Liz hardly knows her?

HAMILTON: We both did. Jake and I both wanted – still want – to be close to Scout, and to stop letting Liz wonder whether you’re gay, Mark. And it seemed wise to show Liz that Jake’s a girl before Scout and I unloaded our past on her.

SCOUT: Jacqueline hoped that she and Liz could help Ham and me stop feeling weird about each other. But before I could take Liz to Grottlesex even once, I blew it with her. … What kind of jerk blows off his girlfriend when she shows up with a bottle of Dom Pérignon on Election Night to help him celebrate his father’s re-election?

MARK: The kind who might be worth electing himself someday, and is as scared of that as he should be. But who isn’t willing to let his girl help him deal with that.

SCOUT: Yeh, the same fun, sensitive guy who’d just ruined her Halloween by turning down her invitation to go to Salem with her and her brother, after they’d already rented a limo.

MARK: You didn’t ruin our Halloween. Liz and I got Brooke and Stewart to come instead of you and Ham, and we had a great time. Besides, we understood why you and Ham wanted to spend Halloween in town. Little kids in costumes begging candy – that’s hard to beat.

SCOUT: I didn’t have to be such a prig, telling Liz I felt that what happened in Salem in the 1690's wasn’t something to party about.

MARK: You only said that when she was teasing you about having missed the fun.

SCOUT: I was a cad. Twice in one week I hurt the feelings of a girl who was trying to be kind to me.

MARK: You did. But you’re no cad. You just couldn’t commit to Liz. You didn’t want Liz to love you, because you couldn’t love her back. And we all know why.

SCOUT (glumly): Because I’m still stuck on Bella.

MARK: Right. But Liz still likes you.

SCOUT: I know. She left me with a kiss, and kind words, and a bottle of champagne.

MARK: And you and Ham can’t feel too weird around each other anymore, or else you wouldn’t have invited him here today … like this.

SCOUT (exchanging glances with HAMILTON): We don’t.

MARK: Well, time heals all wounds.

HAMILTON: Actually, Scout and I healed ours by doing better what we’d done badly three summers ago.

(WILL and MARK exchange looks, first of shock and pain, then of mutual support, before turning to SCOUT and HAMILTON.)

MARK (to HAMILTON): With Jacqueline’s consent?

HAMILTON: Of course.

WILL (to SCOUT): And after you broke up with Liz.

SCOUT: Yes.

MARK: Election Night.

SCOUT: What, did I leave bruises?

MARK: No. But let that slide a minute. Losing Liz hurt you that much?

SCOUT: Yes. I’d been such a jerk, and she’d let me down so gently.

WILL: Why didn’t you find me? You know …

SCOUT: Will, I started to. I was at Ham’s house, remember? His parents had invited me so that I could watch the election returns in some privacy. After dinner, they left Ham and me alone, and went off to host the Election Night party. When Liz showed up with champagne, Ham excused himself and went out to the front porch. After she left, as soon as I could pull myself together, I started to go to our room …

HAMILTON: But I went inside as Scout was putting on his jacket, and asked him whether he’d prefer to fall apart in the arms of a guy he wasn’t trying not to fall even deeper in love with.

WILL: Oh …

HAMILTON: Yeh, it is that obvious. … Liz had come out crying, five minutes after she’d arrived, and when I’d tried to hold her, she’d told me she couldn’t make it work with Scout, and that I should go to him. Then she’d left. So I phoned Jacqueline, and told her what had happened.

WILL: And you asked her …?

HAMILTON: I didn’t need to. Any more than Scout would have needed to ask you.

WILL: I knew Scout stayed at your house that night, of course. But that … right there … with your parents just across the hall?

MARK: Will, our dean’s son has master keys to diverse buildings on campus. For which I am duly grateful.

WILL: Oh … and how did you know … that it happened Election Night?

MARK (after a pause): Because what Ham and I do alone is limited. We only do it – we only can do it as lightly as we like to do it – when we really need to, usually just once a week at mid-week. And we try to do it in a way that lets each of us think about his girl, not about the guy who’s making love to him.

HAMILTON: We’re trying to get each other through the week without becoming unable to focus on schoolwork, or to pass up a pretty girl, but without falling in love with each other.

MARK: Election Night was, of course, a Tuesday, and that Wednesday, when Ham and I got together, because I needed to … well, Ham didn’t, really. What’s usually enough … wasn’t.

SCOUT: I should have known. That’s how Ham and I did it. I learned something. And thinking about Liz was exactly what I needed to do, precisely because it hurt so much. It was perfect – except that …

MARK: Thinking about Liz, you felt a little guilty about ignoring the guy making love to you? Even though you reciprocated later, and even though the foreplay and afterplay were intensely affectionate?

SCOUT: Yeh …

MARK: Welcome to my world, Scout. That’s part of why Ham and I are kinda desperate to have Jackie and Anne here with us all the time.

WILL: Whoa! You mean Anne’ll transfer here if Jacqueline does?

MARK: I hope so.

HAMILTON: She has what it takes to get in. And Mark’s working on persuading her to come. So is Jacqueline. So am I.

MARK: A few weeks ago we all kinda … worked on it together.

SCOUT: I can imagine. Poor Anne!

HAMILTON: Just to help her understand how much we want her here. And how much better it would be if she were.

WILL: Sweet. Our girls’ school could use a resident sexologist. Some of the inmates remain … unenlightened.

SCOUT: Damned few.

MARK: But Anne wouldn’t come here without Jacqueline, and I wouldn’t want her to.

SCOUT: So you’re that confident that Jacqueline will be able to transfer back here – as a girl?

MARK: I’m not sure, but I think it’s likely.

SCOUT: I can’t imagine how.

MARK: I know. And I’ll try to help you. … Partly because Anne and I are in your debt.

SCOUT: I can’t imagine why you think that, either.

MARK: You and Ham spent Halloween night together, too, didn’t you Scout? Not as lovers, but as two guys who hoped soon to be sharing a bed with their girls, right?

SCOUT: Yeh, in my room. Will spent the night in town at the McGrails’.

WILL: I did. Halloween in town beats Halloween at a prep school hands down. But I don’t recall my bed seeming other than as I’d left it when I got back.

SCOUT: Alright, Ham and I took what sleep we got in my bed. But not as lovers.

(WILL shoots MARK a pained, questioning look.)

MARK (to WILL): Believe him. Halloween, too, was a Tuesday, and the next night Ham needed me as much as I needed him.

WILL (to MARK): Sounds like they already weren’t feeling too weird about each other, though.

MARK: Expecting to share a bed with their girls can do that to two guys. Ham and I have been there and done that. … That’s part of why you bedded Scout Election Night, isn’t it, Ham? You wanted to prevent the loss of that expectation from letting the weird feeling come back, didn’t you?

HAMILTON (to SCOUT, somewhat sheepishly): Well … yeh.

SCOUT: Not a bad reason, Ham. It was well done.

MARK: It was. If Hamilton’s almost never what he seems, it’s because he’s better than that. And not just for you. For Anne and me, too.

SCOUT: Meaning what?

MARK: I’m guessing that Halloween night, Ham got you to tell him everything you know about what two guys can do with two girls. And that you shared with him all the results of the diligent research into that subject that you and Will undertook for two weeks on St. Martin.

SCOUT: Yeh, he did. How’d you … oh …

MARK: Right. The next night, when Ham and I were together, he had all sorts of interesting ideas about what he and I might do that next weekend, which was Homecoming at Grottlesex, when we’d be together with Jackie and Anne for the first time in four weeks. At the time, I thought all that was the product of Hamilton’s feverish imagination.

SCOUT: Fleming, you’re shameless.

HAMILTON (shrugging): It’s knowledge. It’s meant to be shared. What else is school for?

MARK: And of course you persuaded Scout to share that knowledge strictly by requesting it straightforwardly, not by lying in his bed with him and teasing it out of him while inviting him to imagine using it with you on Jackie and Liz. You would never do anything like that, Ham.

HAMILTON: Of course not.

WILL (to MARK): Jacqueline and Anne liked it?

MARK (ruffling WILL’s hair): They melted. Ham and I owe you and Scout our thanks.

WILL: Thank Michèle and Denise, next time you’re in Lyons. But I’m glad Scout and I could help.

MARK: So Scout, do you still want an answer to your question? About how I justify helping Ham pretend to nearly everyone here at Rawley that Jacqueline’s a guy? About what good I hope may come from that, not just for me, but for all of us?

SCOUT: Sure, whenever you’re done pawing my roommate. Unless, of course, you and Will have something you want to tell Ham and me first.

WILL (to MARK): Do we?

MARK: Not yet, sadly.

WILL: An asymmetry.

MARK: A lamentable omission.

WILL: Maybe not so lamentable. I mean … (Gesturing toward SCOUT and HAMILTON:) … look at them.

MARK: Yeh. What do you think Jacqueline would do, if she were here now?

WILL: She’d laugh, then pull them together.

MARK: She’d laugh to mask her hurt. Because she’d know it’s her fault. What her guy’s doing to be with her is coming between him and his oldest friend.

WILL: Just like she knows that Ham’s being alone during the week is her fault. That’s why you get to stand in for her, isn’t it? It’s not that she doesn’t trust Ham, even though he’s a chick magnet. It’s that she can’t bear his not being loved because she’d done something so dumb that she had to leave him.

MARK (looking at HAMILTON): Yeh, it is, partly.

WILL: So stand in for her now. Stop dithering, you’ll do fine.

MARK: I’ll try. … Scout, you’ve asked Ham why he’s let people here at Rawley keep on thinking that Jacqueline’s a guy, right?

SCOUT: Of course.

MARK: What’s he told you?

SCOUT: That he thinks it’ll make it easier to bring Jacqueline back here – as a girl. But that goes without saying. Ham would never make a laughingstock of himself, hurt people who care about him, and put our dads and this school at risk, just to postpone or lighten his own punishment.

MARK: That’s all?

SCOUT: No. Ham’s said he’s waiting until his dad gets worried enough about Ham’s visiting Jake every weekend to ask Ham whether he’s gay. Parental relief that he’s not gay could soften his dad’s disapproval. And if his dad asks for the truth about Jake with his parent hat on, it’ll be hard for him to take it off and put his dean hat on after Ham tells him the truth.

MARK: But you don’t buy that?

SCOUT: I can’t imagine how that could help. No matter how Ham’s dad feels, he can’t let Jacqueline re-enroll here without having been punished. If he tried, the Board, including my dad, would have to stop him. It’s out of their hands. At the end of the day, they all work for the students and their parents. And parents who send their kids to a gender-segregated school, and the kids who attend it, expect that …

HAMILTON: Boys will be boys. So did I, I recall distinctly.

SCOUT: And the punishment can’t be anything less than withdrawal for a year, can it?

HAMILTON: I’m afraid almost everyone would insist. Lying about being ineligible to attend gets you booted. And girls are ineligible to attend the boys’ school.

SCOUT: But Jacqueline left voluntarily, right? Nobody on the faculty or staff ever even suggested that she not come back, did they?

HAMILTON: That’s right. And no one’s mentioned it to me, either. Including Finn. He’s never talked to me about stumbling in on Jake and me in the boys’ dorm shower the last day of summer session. Maybe he’s not sure what he saw. Anyhow, he seems not to have done anything about it, maybe because Jake hasn’t come back this term.

SCOUT: So Jacqueline hasn’t been booted. And now that she’s already gone, she can’t be booted. She can’t be given the punishment required for her to be forgiven for enrolling as a guy and allowed to come back as a girl. So I can’t imagine how she could possibly be allowed to come back, or how manipulating your dad’s emotions can help.

MARK: I understand, Scout. The problem isn’t just that you don’t know how Ham hopes to bring Jacqueline back. It’s that you can’t see any possible way of doing that. You trust Ham to do the possible, and to do it well. But he seems to be asking you to trust him to do the impossible.

SCOUT: Exactly, thank you. I can’t see any possible benefit from letting people here keep thinking that his girlfriend’s a boy. All I see are huge risks.

MARK: Believe me, I understand. You’re worried that if the story comes out publicly, there’ll be a scandal that will hurt this school and make your dad and Ham’s both look like fools.

SCOUT: That’s the least of it.

MARK: I know. You’re worried that if the Board learns, from anyone but Ham’s dad, that a girl enrolled here as a boy last summer, and that the Dean never found out, and that his son was and still is her boyfriend, your dad will have to fire Ham’s dad. That would hurt both your dads, hurt your families, hurt Hamilton, hurt you.

SCOUT: Even that’s not the worst of it.

MARK: No, it’s not. … Will, go to him, please.

(WILL, with obvious foreboding, swims across the pool, settles on to the ledge next to SCOUT.)

MARK: If that happened, Jacqueline would blame herself, and everything Ham’s helped her do would come undone. She’d go back onto the same self-destructive path that she was on when she came here – keeping a bike at school, computer hacking, switching schools every year, cross-dressing. But she’d go down it faster. To use your tweak on Virgil, Scout: _Facilior descensus Averno_.

SCOUT (shaken, to HAMILTON): I’ve never dared say that to you, Ham, but … yes.

MARK: Of course you haven’t.

SCOUT (to MARK, half-rasping): And Ham …

MARK: Right. Jacqueline wouldn’t go back to hell alone. It’d be the Maenads for Hamilton; he’d never forgive himself. Virgil’s ending, not Ovid’s – no Elysian Fields. And there’d be a big ugly black hole in the lives of the rest of us, where something wonderful could have been. You can’t imagine why Ham’s risking all that for an impossible dream of bringing Jacqueline back here. It all seems insane, doesn’t it?

(SCOUT, apparently unable to speak, bites his lip, nods.)

HAMILTON (standing, crossing the pool to MARK): Oh good grief, Johnson, ease up on the melodrama. Scout, none of that is going to happen. None. And let Krudski hold you, you won’t turn into poofs.

(WILL puts an arm around SCOUT, who closes his eyes. HAMILTON eyes MARK angrily.)

MARK (standing, to HAMILTON): Had to show you how much you’re hurting him. He’d never have let you see it.

HAMILTON: Yeh, but I’m really bad at punching myself.

MARK: Will, say something brilliant, please.

WILL: I’m not feeling very brilliant. I’d never even thought about the risks to Jacqueline.

MARK: Because you’re in love with love, Krudski, and you worship Fleming for being rather good at it. You can’t even imagine him failing Jacqueline.

WILL: You’re right, I can’t.

MARK: But Hamilton can. He’s scared stiff of all the ways he could fail her, hurt her. Has been ever since the night of the summer cotillion. That’s a huge part of why he’s so good at loving her. He thinks obsessively about how not to fail her, and how to hurt her as little as necessary. So the risks are covered, Scout. Ham’s told you that, I hope?

SCOUT: Repeatedly. But … I can’t imagine how that’s possible.

MARK: Of course. The only thing that could cover those risks is also the only thing that could enable Jacqueline to come back here – for her to have been adequately punished already. And that, as you already said, seems impossible to you.

SCOUT (opening his eyes): You mean she has been punished? Like, formally? Officially? And enough?

MARK: Yes. To my satisfaction, and Anne’s, and Jacqueline’s. It’s Ham’s doing, Scout, but all four of us have thought hard about it. Nobody can foresee every contingency, but we’ve all looked at this from a lot of angles, and we’re all happy with it. Does that make you feel any better?

SCOUT: A little. Four heads are better than two. But all of you are in love, and …

MARK: Love has to be dumb? Passion has to fog the mind? It doesn’t, Scout. That’s the moral of the story. At least, of the part you haven’t heard yet, and of a lot of the part you have heard – everything after the cotillion, in fact. The reason why Ham wants to wait to tell you what he’s done is that you’ll understand that better, and be happier for it, if you learn it along with everyone else – later.

SCOUT: That’s what justifies the charade? That making people wait to learn the truth will be more … edifying, for everyone?

MARK: Yes. And that’s how it helps Jacqueline come back. It’s not just the Dean’s feelings that Ham’s playing with, Scout. It’s everyone’s. Because, as you point out, Ham’s dad works for the kids and their parents. He can’t let her come back if they really don’t want him to. Especially because he can’t seem to favor his own son. Hamilton has to persuade everyone, the whole school.

SCOUT: So Ham, are you waiting for the whole school to ask you whether you’re gay? I kinda think most kids here aren’t gonna bother, they’re already persuaded.

HAMILTON: Good to have you back in form, Calhoun. … (He smiles at MARK and sits down. Pulling MARK down beside him:) But what’ll be persuasive isn’t me. It’s Jacqueline. I don’t plan just to tell everyone the truth. I plan to show them the truth at the same time.

WILL (eagerly): I get it. Scout, whatever’s been done that they’re not telling us will allow Ham’s dad and yours to let Jacqueline come back, but only if people here want her to. What’ll make them want her to is Jacqueline herself – a beautiful girl they all knew as a troubled gay boy, transformed physically and emotionally by true love. A fairy tale come to life. It’ll rock the campus.

HAMILTON: Yeh, it’s shameless, but that’s the plan. It’s not really about justice, it’s about love. We just need enough justice to give love a chance, and we have that. The rest of what we need is … drama.

MARK: And Scout, when Ham’s dad asks him whether he’s gay isn’t the earliest that the play can be staged. It’s the latest. When the Dean asks for the truth, Ham has to give it to him - he has to bring Jacqueline here.

HAMILTON: But the longer we wait, the longer I let everyone at Rawley think I’m gay, the happier the people who care for me will be to learn I’m not. And the more willing they’ll be to let Jake come back.

SCOUT: And time, if you use it well, can make it easier for people to forgive you.

HAMILTON: Exactly. Especially my dad. He’s way too close to this to have been able to deal with it, last summer, the way I know he’ll want to have dealt with it. But now, he’ll see that Jacqueline’s healed, that she and I have stayed together, and that we did as close to the right thing as we could, as soon as we could without hurting her more than she could bear.

SCOUT: Ham, everyone’ll see that you were right not to make Jacqueline leave during summer session, despite the risk to the school, and to our dads. Her soul was a stake. I’ve never questioned that.

WILL: But Ham, your dad might never ask whether you’re gay. And it’s been a while since Jacqueline left. That snow outside reminded Scout of that this morning. Even if your dad doesn’t ask …

HAMILTON (nodding): Yeh, I think we could do it anytime now. Anytime when Jake could get here, that is. I’d like to wait for my dad to ask me – that would help me get him on my side. But at this point, I’m playing for a pretty small advantage by waiting. And Scout, the risks seem so small that I’m comfortable doing that.

SCOUT: So what do you think is the worst that could happen?

MARK: Scout, if what you know were to come out publicly, there would of course be a scandal. But I’m pretty sure your dad wouldn’t have to fire Ham’s dad. And the school’s reputation might come out of it better rather than worse. Because we’d make public what you don’t know, and what you don’t know is good enough to do that.

SCOUT: And if you control how and when it comes out? Like, if Ham’s dad hears it first from Ham, and my dad hears it first from Ham’s dad?

MARK: That is, of course, the plan. And in that case, we think that the worst that could happen is that Jacqueline doesn’t get back in, and Ham and I get booted for a year. The honor code, after all, says that knowing and not telling is as bad as doing.

HAMILTON: But you and Will should be OK. You guys didn’t know Jake was a girl until the last day of summer session, after everyone had already left school.

SCOUT: And if you’re kicked out for a year?

HAMILTON: Mark and I could attend either Grottlesex or Edmund High, depending on where Jake and Anne are. Jake told the truth in her admissions interview at Grottlesex, and … she and I were invited to dinner by the head of admissions there a few Saturdays back.

WILL: “The world will always welcome lovers …”

HAMILTON: Let’s hope so. … And if the girls are at Rawley, Mark can rent a flat in town. No matter what happens, he and I will have our girls, and each other, and the support of our parents and friends.

SCOUT: But Ham, as I said at the start, the charade’s hurting your parents and friends. Hurting Liz. Still hurting Lena, too. Hurting everyone here, other than Will and Bella and me, who cares about you or Mark. Is your small advantage worth it?

WILL: Scout, it’s like the Waldorf. On the first day of summer term, you made me feel a little hurt by dropping the name of a place I’d never heard of. But by taking me there on our way back from St. Martin, just because I’d never heard of it, you made that small hurt part of something wonderful that I want never to forget. For Ham’s parents, for Liz, for Lena, I think Ham’s charade will be like that.

SCOUT: You mean it could end up being cherished by the people it’s hurting now?

WILL: Scout, I’m pretty sure it will.

SCOUT: Maybe. … So, Ham, you tell me that Jacqueline has been punished officially, but that no faculty or staff have been involved. I can think of only one way that could be done. Has the Honor Committee told Jacqueline that she can’t come back for a year, or that she’ll face an honor system complaint if she does?

HAMILTON: Calhoun … would I rat my girl out to the Honor Committee?

SCOUT: I suspect it would be a Rawley first, Fleming. But turning a boy into a girl by kissing him was a surely a Rawley first, too. Wanna answer the question?

HAMILTON: No, Jacqueline has not heard from the Honor Committee.

WILL: Nobody ever uses the honor system, do they? Why is that?

SCOUT: Because it’s merciless. Since the Honor Committee are students, they don’t have much discretion about penalties. If you just want something to stop, and want the person doing it helped to stop doing it, they can’t give you that. And if you report something belatedly, or if you did anything to provoke, or assist, or retaliate against it, you go down with the person who did it.

MARK: And the Dean can’t help you, unless he’s already dealt with the matter.

HAMILTON (shrugging): My dad kinda likes the honor system. Makes him look good by comparison. Keeps him well-informed, too. Students tell him all sorts of things just to make sure the Honor Committee hardly ever meets.

SCOUT: Yeh, they do, but you haven’t. So we’re still pretty much where we started. I can’t imagine how Jacqueline could have been punished in a way that either lets her come back or covers the risks. I want to trust you, Ham, but you still seem to be asking me to trust you to have done the impossible.

HAMILTON (softly): Scout, you’ve played along with my game for three months, despite doubts and fears that hurt you more than you’d ever show me – as Mark just did show me. And you’re not threatening to stop now, you’re just asking me to make it easier for you. You do trust me, impossibly well, better than I could have imagined being trusted.

SCOUT: Because you’ve done the impossible, Ham. Not a day’s gone by, since we walked to Carson, that I haven’t asked myself whether I could do what you did, the night of the cotillion.

WILL (teasing affectionately): Going for an emotionally needy guy?

SCOUT (leaning back into WILL): Noooo … Continuing to go for him after he turned out to be a love-starved straight girl self-destructively screwed up enough to pretend to be a guy at an all-boys’ boarding school. A girl who’d have to leave Rawley, one way or another, no matter what happened.

WILL: Yeh … I’ve asked myself that same question more than once. So has Sean. Let’s hope none of us ever has to find out.

HAMILTON: Scout, the guy I was at the start of the cotillion couldn’t do any of that, and told Jake so. But love can do things through us that you or I can’t do, and it does them by changing us.

MARK (after a pause): Ham, shouldn’t we tell Scout what he doesn’t know? Not telling him’s hurting him more than it’s worth.

HAMILTON: I will tell him, if I can’t make it hurt a lot less without doing that. But I’ve got one more card to play first. One I’ve held so close to my chest that even you and Anne haven’t seen it.

MARK: Anne and I will have to be more attentive to your chest.

HAMILTON (after shooting MARK an appreciative smile): Scout, there’s one other person to whom Jake and I’ve told the whole story, including just how she’s been punished. You might ask him whether he’s satisfied that it covers the risks and could let Jake come back.

SCOUT: Really? Who?

HAMILTON: A guy whose opinion seemed worth having. Whose knowing makes us all safer. And who I wanted on my side in this. A guy who’s been sort of a second father to me all my life. Your dad, Scout.

SCOUT: No … When?

HAMILTON: He gave Jacqueline and me a whole morning during his re-election campaign, the Sunday before Labor Day, in early September. A lovely, long brunch with your mom at your home in Greenwich. Jake and I took the train there from Manhattan. Your folks went to early mass to free up the time for us. They even packed your siblings off to your mom's parents', at my request.

SCOUT: To keep my sisters from being heartbroken at finding out you're taken?

HAMILTON: Because there's no way a seven-year-old boy and two ten- and thirteen-year-old girls could keep this secret.

SCOUT: So my dad’s cool with whatever it is you’re up to?

HAMILTON: Pretty much.

SCOUT: What about my dad's dad?

HAMILTON: I'm kinda hoping he might change.

SCOUT: Don't hold your breath.

HAMILTON: We'll see. But if he doesn't, your parents are pretty sure we can handle him. Your dad's only concern was that Jake get into counseling to help her get over whatever caused her to cross-dress. Both for her own sake, and to protect the school, now that a school official knows. Grottlesex had the same concern, and made weekly visits to the school shrink a condition of her acceptance.

SCOUT: Well then, obviously, there’s no problem. God, Ham, why didn’t you tell me this months ago?

MARK (eyeing HAMILTON sidelong): Scout, haven’t you noticed – in another context – that Hamilton likes to keep you on edge as long as he possibly can?

SCOUT (laughing): Yes, I have. May I borrow him, please?

MARK (disengaging from HAMILTON): Be my guest. When he looks this smug, I can hardly stand to be near him.

SCOUT (to WILL, briefly holding his head): I’ll be back. And you’re right, it is like the Waldorf.

(SCOUT swims across the pool to HAMILTON, and MARK to WILL.)

SCOUT (pulling HAMILTON off the ledge, locking foreheads): Jerk. It was well done, but never do it again. I love you, and her, too much.

HAMILTON: Sorry. I didn’t think you’d seen that part of it. … Mark has his uses.

SCOUT: He does. You’re in good hands. All four … or six … of them.

HAMILTON (nuzzling one of SCOUT’s wrists): Eight of them, guy.

SCOUT: Yeh … ten would be better, though.

HAMILTON: It would. We’ll work on that.

(As HAMILTON pulls SCOUT back onto the ledge with him, WILL and MARK discreetly exchange a hi-five. Both pairs of boys settle back on the pool ledge, fully relaxed for the first time since entering the pool, WILL and MARK nestling into each other and listening as SCOUT and HAMILTON talk.)

SCOUT (to HAMILTON): I should have thought that you’d have told my dad. The obvious thing to do, once one thinks of it.

HAMILTON: All the benefits of telling my dad, with none of the drawbacks. A little distance can put things in perspective.

SCOUT: Yeh. … So it went well? He and my mom liked Jacqueline, of course. And the story. How could they not?

HAMILTON: Seemed to. Before we left, they invited Jake to join us for New Year’s in Greenwich – if Jake and I are out of the closet by then.

SCOUT: Since your folks will be there, too.

HAMILTON: Yeh. A small incentive, your dad said, not to deprive my parents, any longer than seems necessary, of the pleasure of Jacqueline’s company, and of hearing what we’d just told your mom and him.

SCOUT: Meaning that you’re hurting two people really close to him, that he’s putting his friendship with them on the line for you, and that you owe him big time.

HAMILTON: That did not escape me. But Jake and I really enjoyed it. It was like, our first double date with a married couple. Your parents, as always, seemed totally in love – holding hands, kissing occasionally, putting us at ease, and … reassuring us that what we’re trying to do is worth the effort. On the train back, Jake said she hopes we can be like them … and we had a very good night.

SCOUT: So, I suspect, did my parents.

HAMILTON (after a pause): Jake and I kept Bella out of the story we told them. Just said you and Will both found out about Jake by seeing her in a skirt after she left school the day summer session ended.

SCOUT: True, though not the whole truth. Thank you.

HAMILTON: But your dad asked me, alone in the garden after brunch, whether I knew anything about a girl in town that you’d been dating, who’d been claiming to be his daughter. He said you’d mentioned her to him, and that he hadn’t dealt with it well.

SCOUT: Oh god … I didn’t deal with it well, either.

HAMILTON: So I told your dad that she’s a kind, smart, beautiful girl, abandoned by her mom when she was six, who fell for you last summer. That the guy who’s raising her, her mom’s ex-husband, told you and her that she’s your dad’s daughter, to stop what he thought was incest. That he apparently had never said that before to anybody, including her. And that she and her step-dad aren’t seeking publicity, would never blackmail anybody, and share his political orientation.

SCOUT: And?

HAMILTON: He asked how I knew about it. I told him that so far as I knew, Bella’d told only one person, her boyfriend, to keep him from fighting with you, but that you and her boyfriend fought once anyhow, in front of Will and Jake and me, and kinda spilled the beans in the process.

SCOUT: Sean and I were such jerks.

HAMILTON: And I told your dad that so far as I knew, nobody else knew about it, that nobody who knew about it wanted to hurt him, and that I thought it was very unlikely to come out during this fall’s election campaign. I suggested he put it out of his mind until after the election, and help you deal with it then.

SCOUT: Great. You gave him all the assurances I ought to have given him last summer, before I sprang Charlie’s story on him and asked whether it was true.

HAMILTON (wincing): Ewww … Well, like I said, some distance from a problem can help. For what it’s worth, your dad said he’d botched his discussion of this with you last summer by thinking too much about his re-election and not enough about his son.

SCOUT: So what did he say … about Bella?

HAMILTON: He asked whether I thought you and Bella are in love. It mattered, he said, because … well, he indicated that he’s not Bella’s father.

SCOUT: His words, Ham.

HAMILTON: You don’t need his exact words.

SCOUT: Did he ask you not to tell me?

HAMILTON: No, of course not. No more than I asked him not to tell my dad anything. If he thinks my dad needs to be told, he’ll give me a chance to do it myself.

SCOUT: Ham, he’s using you as a messenger, because you’re almost family. His words were for me.

(HAMILTON flits his eyes quickly toward WILL and MARK, then back.)

SCOUT: Tell me.

HAMILTON (softly): He said … that since he married your mother, he’s never shared a bed she wasn’t in.

SCOUT: He chooses his words as carefully as he chooses his friends, don’t you think?

HAMILTON: I think he’s a Senator, with a lot riding on him.

SCOUT: And I think oxymorons do have bars and locks. … So are Bella and I in love?

HAMILTON: You know you’re not. If you were, you wouldn’t have just taken Charlie’s word for it that you can’t be lovers. You’d have found out for sure. But you didn’t. What you’re in love with, Scout, is the dream of giving everybody all the opportunities that you have. You want to make that dream come true, now, for a bright, kind, beautiful girl, and for her stop clinging to a gas station and embrace it.

MARK: Until that happens, you’re gonna have a problem loving any other girl well enough to hold onto her, Scout. You want to save Bella as much as Ham wanted to save Jake.

SCOUT: That’s bad?

HAMILTON: No. But I could save Jake by loving her, because feeling unloved and unlovable is what she needed to be saved from. Bella does not feel unloved or unlovable. … (His eyes dart briefly toward WILL.) … She was saved from that a long time ago. What Bella needs to be saved from is fear of loss. You do that by winning things. It’s hard to win things when you’ve already got them all.

MARK: And you, Calhoun, already have them all – kindness, brains, charm, looks, money, power …

SCOUT: That’s a little discouraging, guys.

HAMILTON: You just have to find the right girl.

SCOUT: Maybe by doing the right thing. That’s how you found yours – and how you’ve kept her.

HAMILTON: No choice, guy.

SCOUT: Yeh … And for Bella and me, the right thing to do is what we should have done last summer, and still haven’t done, isn’t it? We owe it to everybody concerned.

HAMILTON: ‘Fraid so. And now, when your dad’s next election is six years off, is the time to deal with it.

SCOUT: I know. … I just so do not want to revisit that.

WILL: Scout, you’ve worked so hard to suppress your attraction to Bella that to have done it for nothing would hurt. But for your mom to learn from some newspaper what Charlie’s told you would hurt worse. And you don’t want you and me to be rivals for the same girl – but Scout, we can deal with that.

SCOUT: Can we, Will? Didn’t you tell me last summer that I shouldn’t try to find out for sure?

WILL: No, I told you that you shouldn’t to talk to Bella’s mom about Bella’s paternity without Bella’s consent. But talking to Donna isn’t the only way to find out whether your dad is Bella’s dad.

MARK: Why don’t you get a DNA test?

SCOUT: Because DNA half-sibling tests are nearly worthless.

MARK: Really?

SCOUT: Bella and I, getting tested alone, would be unlikely to get a result saying there’s more than a sixty percent chance that we do or don’t have a parent in common.

WILL: You've done your homework.

SCOUT: Last summer - I was motivated.

HAMILTON: But DNA paternity tests are conclusive.

SCOUT: I know, but I can't …

HAMILTON: Scout, I'll ask your dad. During the campaign, just making an appointment to get a paternity test could have cost him the election. But now …

SCOUT: Thanks, Ham. But Bella's not ready. She's terrified that doing anything to find out whether what Charlie told us is true might cause her to lose him.

WILL: True, but that fear's absurd. I've told Bella that. If necessary, I can have Charlie tell her that.  

HAMILTON: Bella needs to know for sure as much as you do, Scout. You're both afraid to commit to anyone – in case you two turn out not to be half-siblings. You both know you’re not right for each other anyway, and you’ve sorta told each other so. But neither of you can really believe the other till you know it’s not just sour grapes. Meanwhile, neither of you will risk hurting the other.

MARK: So you keep looking for something merely comfortable, that’s not about helping each other grow, a relationship you could end without hurting anyone much. Like what you wanted with Liz, and what Bella wanted with Sean. But that’s not what Liz or Sean needs. That’s not what anyone needs.

SCOUT (shaken): You’re right, of course.

MARK: That’s a big part of why you and Bella have both been dumped. And of why Bella and Will are sleeping alone. Uncertainty’s paralyzing.

SCOUT: Will, Mark, I’m sorry.

WILL (disengaging from MARK and paddling across to SCOUT): Don’t be. You didn’t make this mess. And any time before Election Day, two weeks ago, would have been too soon to start cleaning it up.

MARK (draining his mug, setting it down poolside, following WILL across the pool): And Liz does not regret having loved you. Far from it. As for being rivals for the same girl, that can turn out surprisingly well. It did for Ham and me.

SCOUT: You and Ham? Rivals?

WILL: For Jacqueline?

MARK: Who else? She had her heart set on Ham, so I didn’t get in the way …

HAMILTON: You did way better than that.

MARK: But if he’d never gone for her, or if he’d run from her when she told him the truth …

HAMILTON: Or if I’d blown it later … Jacqueline and Mark might be together at some other school now.

SCOUT: That I’ve gotta hear about.

WILL: That, and Mark and Anne … and Dr. Hotchkiss at the cotillion … and you guys, if you’re willing.

SCOUT: And if you’re sure Jacqueline and Anne wouldn’t rather be here for that.

HAMILTON: Of course they’d rather be here. But they’re not. And all four of us want you two on the inside of this with us. So does Bella, who’s already on the inside of it.

MARK: But talking’s thirsty work, Calhoun and, my mug, sadly, is empty.

SCOUT: That can be remedied. … Like the toddy, Will?

WILL: Very much. I’d never had one before.

(HAMILTON and MARK exchange smiles.)

SCOUT: Then shall I go ask Jennifer to bring us another round? 

HAMILTON: Yes please. I think you and Will may need it.

SCOUT (standing): Maybe while you guys cool off in the very empty swimming pool?

WILL: Uh, guy … something's missing.

SCOUT (heading for the stairs): I'll stay with Jenny in the spa lobby until the drinks come.  To safeguard your privacy.

MARK (standing): How thoughtful!

HAMILTON (also standing): Uh - huh. Totally selfless.

 

*       *       *


	13. Scene 9 - Once Puritans, always Puritans

INT – DRUGSTORE, NEW RAWLEY, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

(The store is deserted, save for RYDER, who sits, reading a news magazine, in one of the chairs available for customers waiting to pick up prescriptions, and the store’s photo clerk, a middle-aged man who looks uncannily like the Rawley GROUNDSKEEPER. RYDER now wears a parka, hood pulled up, a winter cap with earflaps down and brim pulled low, a scarf covering his chin, blue jeans, and snowboots. The clerk approaches the customer service counter from behind, carrying a small bag.)

CLERK: Sir, your photos are ready.

RYDER (standing, putting his magazine into an inside parka pocket, approaching the counter, getting out his wallet, voice lowered, trying to sound American): How much?

CLERK: One set of prints, one disk … sixteen thirty-seven, including tax. Cash or plastic?

RYDER: Cash. (He hands the clerk a twenty dollar bill.)

CLERK (ringing up the sale, handing RYDER his change): You’re pushing the limit with these, you know.

RYDER (startled, sounding less American): Excuse me?

CLERK: The girl in half these photos looks well under eighteen. If the sheet had been an inch further down her ass in some of them, the cops might be hauling you off on kiddie porn charges now.

RYDER (after blanching briefly): Once Puritans, always Puritans, eh? (He pockets his change.)

CLERK (looking at RYDER a bit oddly): Look, son, you’re a good photographer. But if you’re going to shoot your girlfriend nearly naked, either use a digital camera or develop your own film. Don’t come back here with this kind of stuff again. (He hands RYDER the bag.)

RYDER (resuming his gruff imitation of an American accent): Thanks. I won’t. (He walks outside.)

 

 

EXT – MAIN STREET, NEW RAWLEY, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

(RYDER walks to the covered entryway of the next store, throws back his hood, lowers his scarf, removes his cap and stuffs it into an outside parka pocket, runs a hand through his hair. He lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, opens the bag, peruses its contents, and smiles, not at all surprised.)

RYDER (softly, in full North Country accent): Delighted at last to make your acquaintance, Miss Pratt.

 

*       *       *  


	14. Scene 10 - Telemachy

INT – NEW RAWLEY INN, JACUZZI, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

(A tray bearing four fresh mugs is set poolside, SCOUT’s robe folded beside it. The old mugs are gone. SCOUT stands in the pool next to the tray, as WILL, HAMILTON and MARK, also standing, approach him from the pool stairs.)

SCOUT: Nice swim?

WILL: Different.

SCOUT (handing mugs to HAMILTON and MARK): Jen’ll be by with the toddies later. Meanwhile, these are hot mulled cider.

HAMILTON: Thanks, I’m parched.

SCOUT (handing a mug to WILL): Thank Jenny, they’re on the house. She’s a nice girl, Will.

MARK: She’s been really great to Anne and me.

SCOUT (to HAMILTON and MARK): So guys, a love story? Or should I say, several of them?

MARK: There is only one love story, Scout. Countless chapters, each different, but all the same story.

SCOUT: Johnson, you’re as daft as Krudski. My sympathies, Ham.

HAMILTON (to MARK): That’s a compliment.

MARK: Obviously. Will, why don’t you and Scout take a seat with a window view?

WILL: Thanks.

(WILL and SCOUT seat themselves on the ledge opposite the window. As HAMILTON and MARK take a seat across the pool from them, each spontaneously drapes an arm around the other. WILL and SCOUT, after a brief eye conversation, hesitantly do the same.)

HAMILTON (to Mark): Push it out, please?

MARK (after sipping his cider): Will – do you remember when you, Scout and Hamilton first met Jacqueline and me?

WILL: Of course – at our first summer-session dinner, the Sunday we all moved in. It was an old-form dinner, just for diploma candidates, mostly us first-years – the summer guest students weren’t here yet. The faculty at the head table, the upperclassmen who’d hazed us that afternoon waiting table for us, the good china, candles, blazers and ties …

SCOUT (muttering): Only time all summer we wore them.

HAMILTON: Scout …

SCOUT: What? I know guest students won’t dress for dinner – or class. And that we need them to keep the school open in the summers. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

WILL (to MARK, after rolling his eyes at SCOUT): When Scout and I got to the dining hall, Ham was hanging out in the vestibule and asked us, all innocent-like, how we’d enjoyed the lake run. Scout was so smoldering … And you, Ham, are such a wicked, twisted tease.

HAMILTON (shrugging): I was just making conversation while I waited for a certain biker to show up.

WILL: And she did … (To MARK:) With you, Brandon, Liz, Brooke … (Rolling his eyes:) And Cynthia.

MARK (shrugging): Cindy, like Jake, had a single – Lena hadn't arrived yet. So Liz and Brooke brought her with them.

WILL (to HAMILTON): And when they walked in, you introduced yourself to them as the dean’s son, introduced Scout and me. … And when you got Jake’s name, you grinned, and told us that Jake would probably be our cox … but you didn’t tell her you’d row stroke.

HAMILTON: Some things are better done than talked about.

WILL: And then you led us all to a table for dinner. Where, though there was some eye-play between you and Jake, you two didn’t talk much.

HAMILTON: I was too busy fending off Cynthia’s questions about the teachers, our reading lists, the grading system, the libraries …

WILL: And trying to shunt her off onto the scholarship kid.

HAMILTON: Who was useless.

WILL: Served you right for snookering Scout and me into the lake run. … And Jake was busy dealing with Brooke’s obvious interest … (To MARK:) Which you and Liz were helping – Liz flirting with Jake about Brooke, you flirting with Brooke about Jake.

MARK (shrugging): It’s what we do. We’ve been told the best twin sex is vicarious.

WILL (To SCOUT): And you, _coloc_ , ingratiated yourself with Liz by stopping Brandon’s interruptions. Brandon kept trying to get his roommate’s twin sister to talk about herself. You got him to talk with you about football instead. And at the end of dinner, Liz gave you a kiss on the cheek.

MARK: I’m impressed, Will. You remember it like it was yesterday.

WILL: I'd never been to a dinner like that – a perfect end to a perfect day … (To SCOUT:) A day I'll never forget. … (To MARK:) But you obviously already knew Jake pretty well – and liked him enough to take him to dinner with Liz and her roommate.

MARK: We'd met that afternoon on the west terrace, during the lake run. I’d gone down to join it …

SCOUT: You first met Jacqueline in your boxers?

MARK: Running shorts, actually. I’d been wearing them in my room as I unpacked, hoping to hit some trails after I finished. … (To HAMILTON:) The woods here are so beautiful.

HAMILTON: Tell your story.

MARK (smiling): Sorry. … As I went out of the common room onto the terrace I saw this guy in a black leather jacket, long-sleeved sweatshirt, and baggy jeans watching the lake run – obviously wanting to join it, but just standing there. So I said, “You comin’?” He said, “Nah, I’ll pass.” … But the tone of voice was sour grapes – someone hurt trying to sound tough.

SCOUT: So you stayed with her.

MARK: I walked over, checked him out, and saw, even through the autumn clothes he was wearing in June, that the shyness wasn’t something working out could fix – he was small-framed but already in great shape, all muscle, not an ounce of fat. … So I turned to watch the lake run with him, and said: “If you’re going commando, I’ll wait while you change.”

SCOUT (laughing): Nice ice-breaker.

MARK: It didn’t work. He just said, totally deadpan, “I’m not.” I tried again – “I personally defanged every crocodile in that lake this morning.” That at least got me eye contact, so I raised the ante – “And the piranhas didn’t bother me. They said they prefer girls.” Predictably, he said, “Then why don’t you go make like a piranha?”

WILL: You deliberately set yourself up for that?

MARK: I obviously wasn’t going to get him to join the lake run, or to talk about whatever was keeping him from joining it. It was time for me to join it alone, if I couldn’t get inside his defenses. The fastest way inside, if he wasn’t a jerk, was to get him to hurt me a little. And the tough-guy act is so scripted.

WILL: That’s so …

MARK: The way girls think?

WILL: Well … yeh.

SCOUT: Mark has a twin sister.

MARK: And she’s been instructive. I’m nowhere near so good at it as a girl. But nobody expects it in a guy, so …

WILL: You can do a lot with a little.

MARK: Sometimes. … So when the shy guy on the terrace took my piranha bait, I shrugged, said “Whatever,” and started toward the lake.

SCOUT: Jacqueline stopped you.

MARK (nodding): Grabbed my wrist and said, “Sorry – it’s just that … if you’re gay, you’d find me really disappointing. … Jake Pratt.”

HAMILTON: Isn’t ambiguity wonderful?

MARK: Yeh. … So I told Jake my name, and after we shook hands, I said was gay enough to ask him to dinner … with my twin sister and her roommate.

WILL: Smooth bounce-back.

MARK: Pratt smiled and said thanks, he’d join us, but that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. I said the clothes and the macho act kinda screamed that, but he might try letting a girl help him get ready.

WILL: And?

MARK: Jake said, really softly, “Harry, I can’t.”

SCOUT: Oh god …

MARK: Yeh. … So I said I might be gay enough to try to hold a guy together till he’s ready to let a girl do it better – if a guy I knew ever needed that.

WILL: You gave her, in a minute, what it took Ham a month to offer.

MARK: Will, I never had that to give.

SCOUT: How’d she react?

MARK: Looked me up and down, then in the eye, flashed me a half-smile, and said “I’ll bear that in mind.”

SCOUT: You got to her.

MARK: A little. So I wrapped up: “And I wouldn’t find a guy disappointing for wanting to end up with a girl. So do I – and I will.”

WILL: She was reassured?

MARK: Jake asked whether I was a breast guy or an ass guy.

SCOUT (cracking up): That’s so Pratt!

WILL: So which is it?

MARK: Funny. … As I told Jake, I'm hopelessly greedy - I want a whole girl. A whole personality including way more empathy than I'll ever have, in a whole body that I can take over the edge way more times a night than I can go over it myself.

WILL: And that’s when she decided she liked you?

MARK: That’s when we noticed that the lake run had turned into a hazing spree. And thought maybe we should hide out before some upperclassmen rounded us up along with all the other first-year guys.

SCOUT: Except for Fleming.

HAMILTON (shrugging): Just my natural instinct to immerse myself in the lake. You and Will could have followed, instead of staying in the shallows with the girls.

SCOUT: You could have told us we’d get dumped in town in wet boxers if we didn’t.

MARK: Price of lust, Calhoun. And while you and Will were paying it, Jake and I hung out in Jake's room.

SCOUT: In your running shorts?

MARK: Jake insisted that I get the exhibitionist experience I’d signed up for.

WILL (grinning at SCOUT): Minty.

MARK: Mintiness has its uses. By the time the rest of you guys straggled back from town in your boxers, I'd learned about Jackie's computer-hacking, and her school-switching, and her mom – and I'd seen her poster.

WILL: So you were concerned.

MARK: And inspired. I didn’t need to see Jake’s bike or her binder to see her bravery, even if she was being brave in dumb ways. So for the next two weeks, Liz and I kept trying to help Brooke's interest in Jake. We got them together at lunch a couple times. And I dropped on Jake a few not too subtle suggestions, like about things in town it might be fun to do with a girl.

WILL: But of course Jacqueline didn’t take them. … She hadn’t seen where the flirting at dinner that first night might lead?

MARK: I hadn’t left her much choice. I’d introduced Jake to the girls before dinner as a guy I’d tried to get to go for me all afternoon, ‘cause he had deep, mysterious issues that no girl could possibly deal with. Jake said, “Actually, kinda I do.” But of course, no girl buys that. Jackie saw pretty quick that she might as well go with the flow and enjoy it.

SCOUT: And she obviously did.

MARK: And so did Brooke. … But then, the next day, at rowing practice, Fleming entered the picture – paired stroke to cox with Jake. When the two of them started hanging out together every chance they could …

WILL: You suspected you and Liz were wasting your time?

MARK: Yeh, but I wasn’t sure. Even though Jake clearly didn’t mind a little male eye candy, and wasn’t closed to male affection, I really thought he was straight.

WILL (puzzled): Because Jake never acted effeminate?

MARK: Because while she and I had hung out in her room, I’d learned that Jake was far from ignorant about … what girls like.

WILL: You talked about _that_ all afternoon?

MARK: Not all afternoon … (To HAMILTON:) But your girl is an even more twisted tease than you are.

HAMILTON (nuzzling): Poor boy.

MARK: I survived. … (To WILL:) And during the next week, as I watched Adonis here, and saw how happy he made Jake, I realized he’s a guy even a pretty straight guy could fall for.

HAMILTON: Life’s ironic.

MARK: Jacqueline’s ironic. … (To WILL:) But just as I was about to give up on trying to get Brooke and Jake together, Fleming’s attraction to Jake seemed to cool.

WILL: After her rooftop kiss sent him into homophobic panic.

MARK: Yes, as I learned later. So during the following week, whenever Pratt and Fleming were around … I paid attention. And that’s how I found out that Jake was Jacqueline.

WILL: When?

MARK: Thursday afternoon, second week of summer session. You and Scout were probably off in town, but a lot of us guys were watching some dumb wrestling show in the common room. Pratt came in and invited Fleming to go riding with her on her motorbike. He blew her off, and she left looking really hurt.

WILL (nodding): That was when Ham first knew he’d fallen for Jake. Ham told us, in August.

MARK: Yes. But Jackie left without seeing that idiot boy here was as hurt as she was, that he obviously hated what he’d just done. I hadn’t heard their conversation well, but I didn’t need to – their faces said it all. So I followed her outside – to her bike, as it turned out.

SCOUT: You hadn’t seen it before?

MARK: No – and, as Will said, it, taken together with her poster, was more than a little disturbing. I did not want her riding it alone, as upset as she was. So I told her I was going with her.

SCOUT: And she let you?

MARK: I insisted. And after riding with my hands on her waist out to a place where she liked to go to be alone … then holding her while she cried … I asked her what her name really was. And why she was pretending to be a guy. And she told me.

SCOUT (incredulous): She trusted you?

MARK: She trusted Hamilton, too, Scout. She told him the third day she was here that she’d scammed a single room by hacking into his dad’s database. But she wanted him to love her for her soul, not her body. She was re-enacting a fairy tale, hoping for a miracle. She let me see that she’s a girl precisely because she didn’t love me. At least, not then – and never that way.

WILL: And you told her what you’d seen on Ham’s face after she left the common room?

MARK: Yeh. I told her that Bozo here clearly did care for her, that he’d hated hurting her. And then …

(MARK looks at HAMILTON, who nods.)

MARK: … she did let me love her, a little.

WILL: No way …

MARK: Will, the girl was emotionally wounded and badly stressed out. Going through here unable to be honest with anybody, showering at four in the morning, more and more scared of being caught as she fell more and more in love. So I gave her what I little could without taking anything physical in return. I asked her to forget me and think, or talk if she wanted, about the guy she was so in love with.

SCOUT: God, Johnson ...

MARK: I couldn’t not, Scout. She was so brave, so wounded, and so utterly alone.

WILL (softly): You gave her, in another way, the sacrifice she wanted from Hamilton.

MARK: Will, that was never a sacrifice.

SCOUT: You did that more than once?

MARK: Twice more, before Fleming finally went for her. Once after she’d had to reject Lena, which made Jackie feel like crap. And again after Fleming broke his cotillion date with her to go with Lena.

SCOUT: Surely not … that girl has pride.

MARK: She does. But she knew, without being told with words, that if Fleming botched it, she’d have chances to reciprocate. And she knew that I didn’t need reciprocation to enjoy doing that for a girl I cared for.

SCOUT: You were able to make her understand that? I’ve tried, Mark, with more than one girl. But they all still seemed to think any guy who’s good to a girl in bed is being selfless and sweet.

HAMILTON: Cherise and Michèle?

SCOUT: With them I had help.

MARK: Right. When two girls see that the kind of sex you and another guy you love most want to give each other is helping each other make it better for your girls … that's persuasive.

SCOUT (to WILL): It is. … (To MARK:) But apart from them, even the girls who’d had enough guys to know better didn’t really get it.

MARK: How could they? Girls get that, with anyone you care for, the giving’s the best part. But there’s no way for them to understand how much more intense that is for guys. Girls can take so much more physical pleasure than we can that giving it to them’s magical, the best part not just of sex but of life for us, the stuff our dreams and egos are made of. But they’ll never have partners like that.

WILL: The point of Ovid’s Tiresias story – the best part of guy sex is vicarious girl sex.

SCOUT: But cross-dressing isn't quite a gender change. And Mark, you were alone with Jacqueline. So how did Jacqueline get it?

MARK: She couldn't, fully. But she'd kept me going on about it during our chat after the lake run. I'd even talked about how thinking about  _why_ girls can take more pleasure - because guys don't have to give birth - makes us want to give it to them even more. And since she knew that I'd said all that thinking she was a guy … 

WILL: She knew you weren’t saying it just to be kind to her.

MARK: Right. She knew I really felt that way, and thought most guys do. … And that, Scout, is how it's done. Next time you want to persuade a girl that what she might mistake for selflessness in bed isn't selfless at all, you just arrange for her to talk with you about it in drag before you know she's a girl.

SCOUT: That's so warped.

MARK: Ya think?

SCOUT: Why didn’t you just end it – take Jacqueline someplace where she could stop pretending to be a boy, stop hurting herself, stop hurting Lena, stop hurting and being hurt by Ham? You, unlike Ham, had other places to take her, and a family that wouldn't have included a pissed-off Dean.

MARK: I couldn’t have. She wanted Fleming.

SCOUT: The third time? After Ham had dumped her to go to the cotillion with Lena?

WILL: When he’d blown it so bad that he himself said he was “history”?

MARK: It wasn’t my call. I was committed to helping her hope for a miracle. And if she didn’t get it, then I was going to need to have honored that commitment. She needed to feel truly loved. I needed to do my best to give her that – whether Fleming came through for her or not. But I hoped he would, and not just for Jackie. I wanted the miracle, too.

SCOUT: More than you wanted the girl.

MARK: I haven't lost the girl.

WILL: You expected that?

MARK: No, but miracles are like that – they exceed expectations. And I thought that if Fleming went for her, and didn't run when he learned the truth … then he might come as close to deserving her as any guy could come to deserving a girl.  

WILL: You were inspired by it even before it happened.

MARK: I was inspired by a girl who dared to hope for it. … But apart from those three times when Jackie was falling apart, she and I just talked. Usually at meals, which Ham mostly took at home.

WILL: Yeh, you two ate together a lot. Often with Scout and me. It was good.

MARK: It was. … And then, the day after the cotillion, Jackie sat down across from me at lunch, dead tired but looking happy for the first time, and grinned, and said: “It happened.”

WILL: Wow.

SCOUT: Wait a minute, Mark. Weren’t you at the cotillion?

MARK: Uh, yeh.

SCOUT: Refresh my memory. Who’d you go with?

MARK: Nobody. I went alone.

SCOUT: Dance with anybody?

MARK: Of course.

SCOUT: Uh-huh. I recall. Did you leave alone?

MARK: Uh, no.

SCOUT: You danced with Lena. Did you leave with her, too?

MARK (to HAMILTON): Busted. … (To SCOUT:) Calhoun, you take dancing way too seriously.

HAMILTON: Scout, Mark was the guy who Lena said had been giving her the hairy eyeball all evening when she dumped me for him and told me to go chase Jake. Lena came with me but left with Mark. He stole my girl and left me dealing with a gay guy in a dinner jacket.

MARK (shrugging): Somebody had to offer poor Lena a straight alternative to her gay date.

WILL: So you coordinated Lena’s distraction with Jacqueline?

MARK: No, I did it solo. I knew there were two great girls hoping to leave the cotillion with Hamilton. Whichever of them didn’t, I hoped to leave with myself.

SCOUT: So when did you tell Jacqueline – or Hamilton – what you’d done?

HAMILTON: Mark didn’t tell us. He planned never to tell us. Lena told me, a few days after the cotillion. She’d seen, of course, that Jake and I were together. I was thanking her, and apologizing for what I’d put her through. So …

WILL: To ease your conscience, she told you that she’d gotten together with Mark after she’d left you, and that he seemed like a really nice guy?

HAMILTON: Yeh. I didn’t know that Mark knew Jake was a girl, so I didn’t think anything of it.

SCOUT: Mark, what if Ham hadn’t gone for Jake after Lena left him, or had gone for her but rejected her or ratted her out when he learned she was a cross-dressing girl? Did you have some plan for that, or did you just leave with Lena and hope that it would all work out?

MARK: If Hamilton didn’t want Jacqueline, I planned to take her for myself, and away from Rawley, and to point Ham and Lena back toward each other. I was pretty sure Jackie was going to force the issue with Ham that night, by telling him she’s a girl. That would have meant not getting the miracle she was hoping for, but she’d had about as much rejection as she could take.

HAMILTON: And Mark was right. Jake tried to tell me, at the cotillion. She said we needed to talk.

MARK: But fortunately, you blew her off one last time - briefly … then cracked and gave her her miracle.

HAMILTON: I just couldn't hurt her any more.

MARK: I know. … (To SCOUT:) Of course, I knew Jackie would want to leave immediately if Ham rejected her, and would have to leave if he ratted her out.

SCOUT: Obviously. So what did you do?

MARK: I was ready to leave with her – I had a backpack all packed. My mom was at our summer place on Nantucket. I thought I'd take Jackie there to chill for a while. Meanwhile, I’d come back here briefly to deal with her stuff and mine, and with Fleming and Lena and the Dean. The one thing I was not going to do was to let her leave alone after being rejected or ratted out by Fleming. I was afraid …

SCOUT: We know what you were afraid of. But how exactly were you going to stop her? I mean, while you were off somewhere with Lena …

MARK: Simple. Before the dance, I clamped a lock on her bike. I tied a note to it, in a sealed envelope inside a plastic sandwich bag.

WILL: And the note said?

MARK: “Can’t let you leave alone. Somebody’s going with you. I’d like it to be me. Wait, I’ll find you.” When I came back the next morning and found the envelope unopened … I unlocked her bike.

SCOUT: So you weren’t exactly surprised at lunch, when she sat down with you and said, “It happened.” Ya know, Johnson, you’re only one month into a five-month story, and your credibility is already in the toilet.

MARK: I was hoping to leave out the part about Lena. I don't have her consent to talk about it. And I’m not exactly proud of how I treated her.

WILL: What? Not proud of getting involved with one girl while planning to run off the next morning with another?

MARK: Look, I’m not totally ashamed of what I did, either. Sure, I wasn’t honest with Lena. And I did it partly to help Jackie. But I wanted to help Lena, too. No matter what happened, Lena was going to get hurt. The sooner she got clear of Pratt and Fleming, the less hurt she’d get. So I tried to help her get clear of them, and then I tried to help her deal with the hurt.

WILL: Mark, Lena came out of her run-in with Jake and Hamilton wondering whether she’s a fag hag.

SCOUT: Not the words I’d have used, but yes. You didn’t stop her from worrying about that so much that she hasn’t dated since.

MARK: Actually, she has, Scout. Lena and I fooled around occasionally for the rest of summer term.

WILL (after exchanging surprised looks with SCOUT): Really? Scout and I didn’t see much of that.

MARK: I tried to be discreet. I did what I’ve done this term with Anne. I used the town – the Inn, Fanny’s, the General Store Café. I’d have used Friendly’s, too, if you and Calhoun didn’t make that impossible.

SCOUT: You’ve explained why you’ve kept Anne off campus. But why the discretion with Lena?

MARK: I didn’t want Jackie to see how close I was to Lena.

SCOUT: You expected Ham would blow it?

MARK: I had no clue what to expect. I was just hoping for the best, whatever that might prove to be. But I wanted to be there for Jackie in case Ham did blow it. I wanted to be able to take her away from here without her feeling she’d hurt Lena more than she already knew she had.

WILL: And Lena was cool with sneaking around?

MARK: Lena was cool with not flaunting something that was less than ideal. I told her at the start, the night of the cotillion, that I couldn’t offer a relationship, and that I couldn’t tell her why.

SCOUT: Because you were stuck on Jacqueline.

MARK: More that I didn’t yet trust Ham to take care of her. But also because I’d gotten involved with Lena by acting on information about Jacqueline that I couldn’t tell Lena I had. I wasn’t going to start a relationship with Lena based on a lie.

WILL: So how did it end, with Lena?

MARK: By summer’s end, both of us were tired of just fooling around and wanted more. We agreed not to start up again fall term if I still couldn’t offer more. Of course, I couldn’t. I won’t be able to come clean with Lena about how I got involved with her until Jackie tells people at Rawley that she’s a girl. Now that I’m with Anne, it’s moot. But I look forward to leveling with Lena.

SCOUT: So what gives with Lena this term? She won’t mess with anybody, including me. Since learning what she did for Ham and Jacqueline at the cotillion, I’ve asked her out repeatedly, before Liz, since Liz –

MARK (growling): Scout …

SCOUT: Don’t worry, I’ve been up front about being unable to commit. But Lena keeps turning me down, saying she’s not ready either. You’re not letting her wait for you, are you?

MARK: Of course not. I’ve told her I’m with someone. But she probably thinks that’s Ham. Like everyone else, she’s seen that Ham and I have become close this term, and probably thinks I’m gay because she thinks he’s gay … and because I don’t bring Anne on campus. She probably thinks she got involved with three guys, all of whom turned out to be gay, in one summer.

WILL: Oh no … So your trying to help Lena get over Jake and Ham ended up making her problem worse.

MARK: I’m afraid so. Not what I intended, obviously. I really like Lena.

SCOUT: So do I, Johnson. … Damned! … Fleming, you and Jake seriously owe that girl. And to make this right won’t be easy. It’ll take a lot more than having Jake show up in a skirt. Or a story that’ll make Lena feel like a fool.

HAMILTON: We know, Scout. Next time Jake cries about it, I’ll phone you, so she can do it on _your_ shoulder, OK?

SCOUT (after a pause): Ham, Mark, my apologies. You guys didn’t mess Jacqueline up … and all anybody can do about her having been messed up is to try to love her and others hurt by it. Mark, that hasn’t been easy for you, and you’ve done it amazingly well.

HAMILTON: Thank you. I was wondering if anyone had noticed that.

WILL: Mark, I’m sorry, too. I can’t see how you could have done better. If Scout and I feel angry … and if you feel ashamed … maybe it’s because sometimes, even the best anyone could possibly do just isn’t good enough. Like when there are two girls, and one of them has to be hurt, so you choose to hurt the stronger, and try to hurt her as little as you can.

SCOUT: Ham, when the time comes to make it up to Lena, if I can help, tell me.

WILL: Me too. If you need a bad love poem, you know where to come.

HAMILTON: Thanks, guys.

WILL: So Ham, I gather Jacqueline knows now about Mark and Lena?

HAMILTON: She does, and it’s my fault. When I first learned that Mark knew Jake’s a girl – which was when I first found myself in the same bed with Anne and Jake and him – I began to put two and two together. I blurted out that Lena'd told me that she’d left the cotillion with Mark. After that, Mark had to spill the rest of it.

MARK: It was sweet, Ham was sort of in shock, trying to understand what had happened, but …

HAMILTON: I wasn’t thinking. And I hurt Jake. Needlessly.

WILL: In the long run it’ll help her, Ham. Lena will forgive Jacqueline, and help her forgive herself. That’s who Lena is. But nobody can ever take from Jacqueline what Mark did for her – his going for Lena in part to help her get over you and Jake, and his giving Lena up because he cared for Jacqueline.

SCOUT: Mark, if Will and I’ve been so harsh that you and Ham would rather not tell us any more …

MARK: Scout, nobody blames you or Will for being upset that Lena’s been hurt. We’ll keep going. … Ham, I told my part of it up to the cotillion. You wanna take it from there, with Dr. Hotchkiss?

HAMILTON: Sure. … (He drinks some cider.) … At the cotillion, after I kissed Jake in the men’s room … and she told me – showed me – that she’s a girl, I lost it so bad that I literally ran into Dr. Hotchkiss on my way out. Spilled his drink, almost knocked him down.

WILL: He noticed you were upset?

HAMILTON (not amused): And asked if I was going home. … (His voice starting to falter and crack a bit:) He came by the house a while later, while the parentals were still chaperoning. I … I couldn’t even answer the door.

(HAMILTON pauses. MARK sets his own mug down poolside.)

HAMILTON (still faltering): So he let himself in, walked up to my room. Just sat there till I talked to him. He… He could see … I just … 

(MARK takes HAMILTON’s mug, sets it down poolside by his own, looks at SCOUT.)

SCOUT (to MARK): Hold him.

MARK (putting his arms around HAMILTON, nuzzling his hair): Thanks.

HAMILTON: I'm sorry.

SCOUT: Ham, it’s OK. The reward of service is to be called to harder service. In giving Jake one miracle, you were called to give Jacqueline another. It’s even harder, but you’re doing it well, guy.

WILL: Yeh. … “ _Quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam_?”

HAMILTON (still faltering a bit, but doing better): I told Dr. Hotchkiss my problem. I didn’t mention Jake’s name, or cross-dressing … or school-switching, or computer hacking … or her mom. I just told him there was a girl who wanted and needed me. That I really liked her, but had just found out she was really messed up. That she was hurting herself and that I didn’t know whether I could help her. That I wanted to try, but that I was scared. That if I let myself get more involved with her I might get really hurt, because even if I could help her, sooner or later she’d have to leave Rawley. That I couldn’t see any way to make it last.

WILL: Was Dr. Hotchkiss able to help?

HAMILTON: First he talked about his wife, what he’d loved about her, what he’d felt when she died. “You’ll get hurt,” he said. “We all do. But what hurts most, at the end, is that you could have loved better, and didn’t. Maybe that’s why we hope for heaven – because we never love well enough here.”

SCOUT (softly): That’s spot on.

WILL: Yeh. … (To HAMILTON:) And then?

HAMILTON: He asked me what I most liked – or maybe loved – about my girl. “Her courage,” I told him. “Then if you love her, that’s what you’ll get,” he said. “Courage. All the courage you need, if you love her enough.” … Finally, he recited some lines from _The Odyssey_ , and said: “Clear your head, son. Chart a course home. All the way home to Ithaca.” Then he left. He was only there a few minutes.

SCOUT (slowly, savoring that story): So … were you able to do that, Ham? To chart a way past your fears, past his regrets … all the way to where you want to be?

HAMILTON: I was - that same night. By getting past my anger at what Jake had done, my horror at why she’d done it, my fear of being hurt – and just thinking of how to love her. That’s when I thought through how to try to help her heal, and take her out of Rawley this fall, and bring her back next year, and deal with the risks – everything I’ve told you and haven’t told you, all I’ve done and hope to do.

SCOUT: That’s incredible.

HAMILTON: It was necessary. I had to do that before I could go to her. I couldn’t commit to her without hope of saving her and having a future with her. And I had to do it fast. I knew that if I hadn’t done it by daybreak, she be gone. When I finally knocked on her door, at first light, she was writing me a goodbye note.

WILL (awed): So … in your beginning is your end.

MARK: See what I mean, now? About love not having to be dumb?

WILL: Yeh. That’s what Dr. Hotchkiss was telling Ham, isn’t it? It’s the theme of _The Odyssey_. … (Looking at HAMILTON:)

           He will not long be absent from the dear land of his fathers,  
           not though the bonds that hold him be of iron, for he will be thinking  
           of a way to come back; he’s a man of many resources.  
           But come now, tell me this, and give me an accurate answer:  
           Are you, grown tall as you are, the true son of Odysseus?  
           Indeed, strangely like his are your head and your beautiful eyes.

SCOUT: I kinda think what Athena says fits Ham better:

           One needs cunning and subtlety in order to surpass you  
           in all manner of guile, even when a god’s up against you,  
           tirelessly devious trickster – you who refuse to give up,  
           even in your native land, your wretchedly deceitful ways  
           and your lying stories. They’re near to the core of your nature.

MARK: No, those are both much too kind. What fits Ham best is this:

           He knew how to tell false tales that sounded as if they were true.  
           Listening to him, her tears ran, and her whole body was melted,  
           even as when the snow melts among the heights atop mountains …  
           making the rivers flow full. Her beautiful cheeks streamed with tears.  
           So Penelope wept, mourning the man sitting next to her.

HAMILTON (to MARK): Well, at least Will likes me. … (To WILL:) But which lines Dr. Hotchkiss chose - that’s mine alone. To the grave.

WILL: You really love him, don’t you, Ham? … But Dr. Hotchkiss must know by now. He must have seen you with Jake. He must know that Jake left, and that you’ve visited Jake most weekends this term. And you told him it was a girl that you’d fallen for. But he’s never told your folks?

HAMILTON: If he did, I’d never trust anybody again. Besides, he doesn’t know. Not for sure. That’s all the excuse he needs not to tell.

SCOUT: That’s all people ever need, when you’re breaking rules, if they think you’re doing the right thing – an excuse to pretend not to know. A cover.

WILL: But you’ve talked since … about Jacqueline? In some way that lets him keep his cover?

HAMILTON: Not really. He just asks me how my course home to Ithaca’s going. Or makes up funny stories, like he did today, about kids misbehaving at the cotillion because he neglected his chaperoning duties.

SCOUT (imitating the old teacher’s voice): “So, Hamilton, how goes your course to Ithaca?”

HAMILTON (smiling): “Well, so far, sir. And when I’m safely home, I’ll introduce Penelope to you.”

SCOUT: Well, Latin class will never be quite the same. I’ll make a point to get to know our teacher better.

HAMILTON: Do. And despite his kidding, he adores your dad.

SCOUT: I know. … So, Mark, the day after the cotillion, at lunch, Jacqueline told you what you’d already learned from your unopened envelope on her bike. She and Ham were together. They stayed together, and he helped her heal enough to leave Rawley safely. That was what you’d wanted. But that wasn’t the end of your involvement?

MARK: No, that was just the beginning … (Gazing into HAMILTON's eyes:) Obviously. (He removes one arm from around HAMILTON, picks up HAMILTON’s drink, hands it to him, then picks up his own.)

SCOUT: So you got close to Hamilton through Jacqueline after the cotillion – while being there for her in case he blew it?

MARK: No. I didn’t get close to Ham until this term. But I started studying with him sometimes right after I got close to Jackie. Like that evening a week or so before the cotillion when he and Will and I were in the common room and Ryder pulled his stunt with the video camera. Remember that, Ham?

HAMILTON: I try not to. Ryder’s such an ass.

MARK: He got even nastier after you left. Left a mess that had to be dealt with. Will dealt with it, so I didn’t have to. My first insight into what Krudski’s made of. … Will, you’re no outsider. Anything, anytime, anywhere, guy. I mean it.

WILL (blushing slightly): For what it’s worth … likewise.

MARK: It’s worth a lot. … Anyhow, after the cotillion, Jackie and I would just eat together, and sometimes take walks afterwards. And we’d talk, but not about Ham. Or Lena. About everything else. It was great. And then summer term ended.

SCOUT: So you just let her ride off, trusting Ham to deal with everything?

MARK: No. I asked her to get in touch well before August break ended to tell me her plans for autumn term. I’d tried to impress on her that she couldn’t stay at Rawley as a guy. I thought that Fleming had more sense than to let her, but I wanted to make sure. And I wanted to be in a position to help with alternatives, if she needed help.

SCOUT: Family contacts at other schools in the region?

MARK: That, and other stuff.

WILL: And Ham, you still didn’t know that Mark knew Jacqueline was a girl?

HAMILTON: Hadn’t a clue. I knew they were friends, of course. But the one thing I didn’t worry about last summer was competition from other guys. Besides, Lena’d told me she was seeing Mark, and, knowing to look for it, I’d seen it when they were together.

MARK: So one day in late August, when I was on Nantucket with my family, Jackie phoned me. She told me she’d be going to Grottlesex fall term, as a girl, for a year - after which she hoped to come back to Rawley. And she asked me to do her a favor.

SCOUT: What?

MARK: She asked me to cox JD crew instead of her this year.

SCOUT: Really? A good choice. You’ve done it well.

MARK: Not as well as Jake did. I’ve heard that from every guy in the crew. As you know, I’m working out - upper-body stuff, including on the erg - and next year I hope to row. … But that’s not all Jackie said when I phoned her.

SCOUT: What else?

MARK (looking at HAMILTON): She warned me that what she asked might prove harder than I expected. She told me to call her if I thought I couldn’t do it anymore, and she’d try to help me deal with it. At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant.

WILL: Oh god … she sandbagged you. She set you up to fall for our gorgeous stroke. She wanted somebody she liked and trusted to take care of him while she was gone. Somebody she liked and trusted so much that she didn’t mind sharing her guy with him. You fell for Ham because you’d been sharing what she felt for him, and she knew that’d happen.

SCOUT: Mark fell for Hamilton because he’s Hamilton, Will. But yeh, Jacqueline obviously set that up.

WILL: So, Ham … you, as stroke, had to help Finn train our new cox. You and Mark must have talked a lot about how Jake used to do it, right?

SCOUT: And then about Jake generally? And about how much both you guys liked … “him”?

WILL: And soon you were pouring your poor tormented gay heart out to our miraculously sympathetic new cox, weren’t you? Just two lonely guys sharing their love for another guy …

HAMILTON: Krudski, the inner workings of a well-functioning cox-stroke relationship are no concern of the seven. … (To SCOUT:) Or the six.

WILL: Uh - huh. So Jacqueline sandbagged you, too, didn’t she, Ham?

HAMILTON: Of course not. She knew I’d never be attracted to a guy.

SCOUT: Of course, never. … So how long did it take for the “cox-stroke relationship” to become so “well-functioning” that you guys couldn’t stand it anymore?

MARK: Until the last week in September.

SCOUT: Three whole weeks, huh?

HAMILTON: Three weeks of looking, five days a week, two hours a day, straight at this sweet guy who obviously loved Jake, sitting in the same seat where she’d sat in drag, coxing us and looking into my eyes every few seconds the same way she used to. I was going nuts.

MARK: Even worse for me, of course. I didn’t have a weekend girlfriend.

HAMILTON: To me, Mark seemed to be a basically straight guy who’d somehow responded to Jake a lot like I had, and was half in love her, despite thinking Jake was a guy. That reminded me so much of what had happened to me with Jake that …

WILL: You empathized, and your compassion gave birth to passion.

SCOUT: Which Jacqueline foresaw, ‘cause it’s what happened to you with her.

HAMILTON: Yeh, but I didn’t know that. I just knew I wanted to love him – but couldn’t.

MARK: And to me, Ham was the guy who’d loved a girl I cared for so well that he’d been willing, first to be gay for her, then to let everyone think he was gay, then to give her up during the weeks. And there I was, during those weeks, talking about her with him while he suffered. I so wanted to ease that.

SCOUT: Equally foreseeable, for Jacqueline.

MARK: We hardly touched. That would have ruined everything. We’d have hated ourselves, and each other – and we both knew that, in spite of the lies between us. But every day, we were talking less and less with words and more and more with our eyes …

WILL: Scout and I can relate.

MARK: Then, the last Wednesday in September, as Ham eased me down from a set of pull-ups that he'd helped me finish the last of … I messed.

SCOUT: Oh god … you weren’t taking care of yourself?

MARK: When I tried to think about Lena, or a friend of Liz’s who’d been good to me on Nantucket … either Jackie or Ham, or both, kept coming into my head. And if you start doing that thinking about a guy … or a girl you can’t have, and whose guy you’re falling for …

SCOUT: God help you.

MARK: Yeh. And Ham obviously wasn’t doing that. He was plainly in agony by Fridays. So … I kept him company.

SCOUT: You knew what would happen, sooner or later.

MARK: I thought it would happen while I was asleep. But when that happens, and the guy you’re with holds you close till it’s over, then looks into your eyes and says, “Thank you,” gently cleans you both up and lies you down with him, just holding you …

WILL: You have a lover. … (To HAMILTON:) “Thank you”?

HAMILTON: Flattering as hell, Will. Mark, trying not to fall for me, had gone without for over a week. Do you have any idea how much willpower that takes?

WILL: No, it sounds academically suicidal. Do you?

HAMILTON: I’d had the same problem before the summer cotillion. Fortunately, it did happen to me in my sleep. But then, Jake wasn’t working out and hanging out with me in just gym shorts in the boathouse every afternoon.

WILL (after shaking his head and rubbing his forehead for a moment): So Mark, did you phone Jacqueline for help?

MARK: That evening. What else could I do? I couldn’t walk away, I was in way too deep with both of them. I couldn’t tell Ham I knew, and how I knew, that Jackie was a girl. He had to hear that from her, not me. But I needed to start being emotionally honest with somebody – at least Ham, preferably also a girl.

WILL: And was your phone chat with Jacqueline pleasant and productive?

MARK: Oh, yeh. By then it had dawned on me that she’d intended what had happened to happen. But I was way past furious, I was desperate. I just wanted a solution. So Jackie ditched Ham for the next weekend and invited me to Grottlesex.

SCOUT: You’re kidding. She didn’t …

MARK: No, of course she didn’t. She set me up with Anne, who'd just moved in with her.

SCOUT: Before or after you phoned Jacqueline?

MARK: I phoned Jackie on Wednesday. She and Anne chased Sally off on Thursday.

WILL: Anne moved in with Jacqueline … to be set up with you?

HAMILTON: She didn't move in with Jake until they knew Mark was coming. They, uh … didn't want to room together until they both had boyfriends.

WILL:  Oh …

SCOUT (after exchanging a quiet smile with WILL): So Anne knew that Mark was about to show up at Grottlesex in desperate need of a girlfriend?

MARK: She did. Jackie’d told Anne everything she knew about me – all of it – and showed her a few photographs, to boot. And of course, Anne already knew Hamilton.

SCOUT: And Anne volunteered to be set up with you knowing that you were half in love with Jacqueline, and that Jacqueline had already set you up to fall for Ham?

HAMILTON: Scout, when Jake told Anne what Mark had done for Jake and me, Anne …

MARK (to HAMILTON): Stop! … (To SCOUT:) Yes. Anne was volunteering to be half of a couple in love with Jacqueline and Hamilton, Scout. Love of them is what drew Anne and me together.

HAMILTON (softly): You both so underrate yourselves.

SCOUT: Clearly. … (To MARK:) Did Anne tell you all this when you and she first met?

MARK: Jacqueline told me all that, and everything else she knew about Anne, before she introduced me to Anne, Friday evening of that weekend at the end of September. Anne and I watched each other, first across a dining hall, then across a common room, while Jackie did that, Anne knowing she was doing it, I knowing she knew. … It was really romantic, in a weird way.

SCOUT: A very old way, guy. And I gather you’re happy with Anne.

MARK: Deliriously. Anne’s a rock. Nothing shakes her. And when she commits, she holds nothing back. She’s, like, the perfect partner. Together, we can deal with anything – even Pratt and Fleming.

SCOUT: And she must be happy with you, if she’s thinking of transferring to Rawley. Are you in love with Anne, Mark?

MARK: I honestly don’t know. I haven’t had to give up anything for her. Not like Hamilton. In order even to get close to Jackie, he had to give up something that really mattered to him. He couldn’t have kissed her, thinking she was a guy, if he hadn’t already been in love with her. If that kind of sacrifice is what it takes to know you’re in love … I’m content not to know.

HAMILTON (to MARK): I kinda think you are.

SCOUT: Sounds like an informed opinion.

HAMILTON (laughing): You could say that.

WILL: But Mark, when you phoned Jacqueline, and she invited you to Grottlesex, didn't you plan to ask her, not just to level with Ham, but also to let you level with Lena, so that you could get back together with Lena?

MARK: And do what, during the weeks, with Hamilton? Pull him in with Lena and me? I didn't know how Jackie'd feel about that, or whether she'd want the two-couple closeness Lena, Ham and I would want. And I didn't know how much she'd healed, or how she hoped to come back here. All I knew is that I needed to talk with her, in person, for the first time in almost two months.

WILL: Did you?

MARK: Not really. When I got off the bus at Grottlesex, I was so blown away by seeing Jackie in a skirt, and by how happy and well she was, that I just drank that in until, at dinner, she started telling me about her new roommate.

WILL: And then Lena and you were history.

MARK: But not because I liked Lena less than Anne. Because circumstances made Anne a better partner for loving Jackie and Ham. Above all, because Anne was Jackie's gift. I had to trust that some other guy would love Lena better than I could. … (To SCOUT:) And anything I can do to help …

SCOUT: Thanks. … So Ham, you were left alone that weekend. What did Mark and Jacqueline tell you they were doing?

HAMILTON: Mark told me he was going to visit a friend from middle school. Jake said she was getting together with her mom, ‘cause Jake’s birthday had been that week.

MARK: All true. I do have a friend from middle school at Grottlesex, and I looked him up. And Jackie’s mom visited Grottlesex that Saturday. Anne and I had a great birthday dinner with Jackie and her at the hotel where she was staying – and frankly, Anne and I like her.

SCOUT: That’s welcome news.

HAMILTON: She was never as bad as Jake made her out to be, and she seems to be getting better. I spent some time with her a couple weeks later, at Grottlesex’ parents’ weekend. And don’t feel too sorry for me. I wasn’t left entirely alone that last weekend in September . A nice girl took pity on me.

SCOUT: Really? Who?

HAMILTON: Bella. She asked me to Fanny’s and a movie Saturday evening.

SCOUT: Bella was in on this?

MARK: Scout, Bella’s in on pretty much everything Jackie does. … (Deliberately, looking straight at WILL:) Isn’t she, Will?

WILL (equally deliberately, his eyes locked on MARK’s, smiling faintly): Yes, she is.

SCOUT: You knew about this?

WILL: Of course. In advance.

SCOUT: OK. … So Ham, how was your date with Bella? What’d you talk about over dinner?

HAMILTON: Lovers and love stories. Will. Jake. Austen’s _Sense and Sensibility_. Wilder’s _Our Town_. Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_.

SCOUT: Sounds romantic.

HAMILTON: It was. So was the drive-in movie.

SCOUT: The drive-in? … (To WILL): Tell me Bella’s not still driving on a learner’s permit, without someone over twenty-one in the car. I mean, after she broke an axle on her truck …

WILL: She’s not. She and Charlie had words. So have she and I, now that I have a say in the matter.

SCOUT: Good. … (To HAMILTON:) So you walked to the drive-in, like you Jake, and Lena did last summer?

WILL: You mean, the same night you let Paige drive you to the same movie?

SCOUT: Like I knew Massachusetts driving laws my third week here?

WILL: You knew that boarding students can’t keep cars at this school – or any other prep school – unless, like Ryder, they have some non-existent doctor-certified back injury.

SCOUT: So I dated Paige Bennett without caring a fig for her. That’s sick, I know. But I did it so that Bella wouldn’t stop talking to me … and I do care about Bella.

WILL: And I hope you always will, Scout. … But no, Bella and Ham didn’t walk to the drive-in. They double-dated, in two cars, with a couple of Edmond juniors, who drove. In return, Bella agreed to cover their tickets – although, Ham being Ham, she ended up not paying for anything that evening.

SCOUT: Nicely done, Ham. … Good movie?

HAMILTON: _Love Story_. Bella’s a fan, as you know. She told me that she’d cribbed her first flirt-banter with you from [its first two scenes](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb4Rfj1wp0Q), and that you’d known it well enough to play along. But after a while it got so sad. Bella and I were happier thinking about Will and Jake.

SCOUT: Fleming, you didn’t …

HAMILTON: Bella insisted. Cutely, too. She’d asked me to bring my cell – in case she was needed at the gas station, she said. Half an hour into the movie she asks to use it, logs on to her e-mail, tells me there’s a message from Jake, shows it to me. It’s to me, cc Bella and Will: “Kiss her, stupid!” So I did.

SCOUT (to WILL): Cc you?

WILL: When Bella and I agreed to try to get together, the day you and I got back from St. Martin, we wrote each other a blank check for Jacqueline and Ham. ‘Cause they’re kinda like the catalyst for our reaction. They’re what brought Bella around to me, first on our trip to Carson in August, and again when Bella visited them in Manhattan in late August. Our loving them is part of loving each other.

SCOUT (after a pause): Why are you guys telling me this when Bella isn’t here?

WILL: Because Jacqueline, Ham and Bella and I want you with us, Scout. You and a girl you really love.

MARK: So do I, Scout. So will Anne – she, Jackie, Bella, Ham and I are all pretty sure. We want you to know what we’ve got because we’d like you in it.

HAMILTON: But for that to happen, you have to get over Bella. She loves Will. I’ve held her in my arms and felt that. At the drive-in, and in New York with Jake, while Will was with you on St. Martin. ‘Cause after realizing she’d been blind to Will, and losing you and Sean, and being screwed again by her mom – not to mention being worried about Will’s scholarship, and about Grace, and Jake, and Caroline …

SCOUT: She was a mess. I get it. Thanks for helping her. … Why don’t you get on with the story?

HAMILTON: Alright. … That Sunday evening, when Mark came back from “visiting a friend,” he phoned me and we met at the boathouse. He told me he’d met a really great girl. He wouldn’t tell me much, but I was so happy that … well, I kissed him.

MARK: For the first time. Something memorable, Will. If you don’t believe me, ask Bella … or Scout.

(WILL raises his eyebrows at SCOUT.)

SCOUT: Ask Bella.

WILL: I did.

HAMILTON (amused): The next day, I phoned Jacqueline, and asked that we invite Mark to Grottlesex the next weekend – with his new girlfriend if he wanted to bring her – and tell him the truth.

SCOUT: I trust Jacqueline made you beg?

HAMILTON: And plead, and grovel, and finally admit that, yeh, I kinda love him – all with Anne listening in, I learned later – before she reluctantly agreed.

MARK: Ah well, girls will be girls. If they were guys, you’d want to punch ‘em sometimes, huh? … (He takes a sip of cider.) … Anyhow, I accepted Ham’s kind invitation to bring my new girlfriend to join him and Jake at Grottlesex the next Saturday.

SCOUT: That was what, the first week in October, just before Columbus Day? That’s the week you guys suddenly started flirting with each other, and with Will and me, in the dorm, at the boathouse …

WILL: Then dragging us over to the girls’ school grounds for anything that might suck in some girls …

SCOUT: Yeh, that’s how I got together with Liz. She came out to watch Mark make a fool of himself posing girls for Fleming to photograph on the lawn – pawing them thoroughly in the process, of course. She and I traded guesses as to what these two turkeys were so insanely happy about.

MARK: No reason. Just our natural state.

SCOUT: Turns out Liz got it dead right. She said you both obviously expected to get laid soon, and to do it together, probably for the first time.

WILL: How do girls do that?

SCOUT: Beats me, guy. Then Liz asked me: “So, is Harry gay or is Hamilton straight?”

HAMILTON: And you of course bartered your knowledge of the answer for a date …

SCOUT: Seemed the kind thing to do. Liz was so worried about her brother.

MARK: Right. And early that Friday afternoon, while you were salivating over my sister, I bused to Grottlesex, telling Ham I was off to fetch my girl and persuading Finn to cox crew practice for me.

SCOUT: Yeh … how did you get Finn to do that?

MARK: Easily. The guy’s become a hopeless romantic.

HAMILTON: Obviously, when I arrived at Grottlesex Friday evening, my intended surprise for Mark turned into a bigger surprise for me. When Jake and I walked into her dorm room, Mark and Anne were there in bed. Before I could wrap my head around that, my clothes were off and all three of them were on top of me. And Jake was so happy, happier than I’d ever seen her. It was heaven.

MARK: Yeh, it was.

HAMILTON: And then, as they were telling me how we’d all gotten there, I ruined it by blurting out that Mark had left the cotillion with Lena.

MARK (caressing HAMILTON’s head): Ham, that didn’t ruin it. That just made it more intense – less about welcoming you and more about thanking Jackie for getting the four of us together. And that’s the way it should have been. It’s always been about Jackie, really, for all of us. Her feelings of guilt were what we needed to deal with.

HAMILTON (nestling into MARK): God, I love you.

MARK: Because _we_ love _her_. Jackie’s problems are what made all this weird wonderful stuff happen. She’s made something good come of them. She’s created something she’d never had – a family that loves her.

(SCOUT and WILL exchange an awed, envious look.)

MARK (to SCOUT and WILL): And that’s kinda the end of the story, ‘cause it’s really all Jacqueline’s story.

WILL: What, you’re gonna stop just where the great sex starts?

HAMILTON: Great sex is better done than talked about. But that Columbus Day weekend at Grottlesex was amazing. Except for meals and coursework, we hardly came up for air.

MARK (drinking some cider): And our second time all together, the first weekend this month, was great, too, thanks in part to what Scout taught Ham. But those two weekends are the only times all four of us have been together, so far. Most weekends, Jackie and Ham are at Grottlesex, Anne and I are here. We want to be two couples, each of which loves the other, not four individuals in love with three other people.

SCOUT: Quite an arrangement.

MARK: It could only work with four people who all really like and trust each other. Jackie’s arranged things so that all of us do.

HAMILTON: And it's wonderful. But it can’t last. It’s too complex, too intense, too risky emotionally. It has to change into something more normal. Mark and I need to be with our girls a lot more.

SCOUT: I’m amazed that Mark can be with Anne as often as he is. You, not living in the dorms, can spend as many weekends at Grottlesex as your parents allow. But how does Anne manage to spend most weekends here? Doesn’t Grottlesex limit the number of free weekends that boarding students get?

HAMILTON: Less rigidly than most prep schools. That, along with rolling admissions and proximity to Rawley, is why Jake’s there. There’s no numerical limit on weekends away from school, but either the student’s parents or some other adult approved by them has to phone an invitation to the Headmaster’s office. For Jake, later this school year, I’m hoping that’ll be one of my parents.

SCOUT: And who invites Anne here?

MARK: Uh, Charlie Banks.

WILL (exchanging eye-rolls with SCOUT): How did you arrange that?

MARK: Anne's parents came East for Grottlesex’s parents’ weekend. Same weekend as ours, the weekend after Columbus Day. And like ours, a long weekend that starts early, so that families can go foliage-viewing together. Anne had told them about me, and they wanted to meet me. And I wanted to meet them. So instead of going leaf-peeping, they came here, with Anne, before heading home. Stayed here at the Inn.

SCOUT: That's why you bailed on going to Vermont with Liz and your parents?

MARK: My parents were so taken with my sister's new boyfriend that I was hardly missed.

SCOUT: And here I thought you were being gallant, letting me go with them instead.

MARK: I'd have done that anyhow. … But bringing Anne's parents here meant explaining to them why I wouldn't be showing them and Anne around campus, or introducing them to anyone at school as my girlfriend's parents … and why they couldn't mention "Jacqueline Pratt" to anyone here.

WILL: You told them the story?

MARK: Anne did, at Grottlesex, after they'd met Jackie. And Hamilton showed them around Rawley before he left for Grottlesex on Saturday. And I spent the weekend in town with Anne and her parents.

SCOUT: And they’re cool with the four of you?

MARK: Enough to promise to keep Jackie's secret for a while. And to let her and Ham tell it if they feel it needs telling.

HAMILTON: But they did urge me to come clean soon. They’re not happy that Mark’s parents, and mine, and Jake’s mom, are still in the dark. 

MARK: Anyhow, Anne introduced them to Bella, they took the Banks’ out to dinner, Charlie showed them around town …

WILL (to SCOUT): The girls have been busy. … (To MARK:) So how much does Charlie know?

MARK: Just that I’m with Anne, and that Jake and Ham got us together. He doesn’t know Jake’s a girl, or that she rooms with Anne, or that my parents don’t know about Anne. 

SCOUT: And Charlie’s letting Grottlesex think that Anne’s staying at his place?

MARK: Grottlesex doesn’t care who owns the room Anne sleeps in. It wants an adult approved by Anne’s parents to stand in for them when it can’t. And Charlie does. Anne sees him every time she’s here, he knows when she comes and goes, and he can always reach her and them.

WILL: Mark, Charlie’s knowing about Anne and you is risky. It’s a small town. He knows everybody. 

MARK: Will, that’s covered. Charlie and Grace have promised not to mention Anne and me to anyone from Rawley. I didn’t even have to ask. They think I’m being discreet so that I don’t get caught sneaking out to be with a girl in town after lights out. People in this town have been covering for Rawley guys doing that for as long as the school has been here.

WILL: If they think the guy’s treating the girl right.

MARK: Anne makes it easy. And I’ve had help. … But even with all the help, she’s not here often enough.

HAMILTON: And I’m not with Jake often enough. Not that what Mark and I have isn’t good. It’s so good that we need our girls here to share it – if that makes any sense.

WILL: It totally makes sense.

SCOUT: At least you’re not rooming together. How bad is it for you guys, in the boat, with Mark coxing?

HAMILTON: Pretty bad. Or rather, way too good.

MARK: Even worse for me. I haven’t been with Anne as long as Ham’s been with Jacqueline. And I’ve just never known anybody like Hamilton.

(HAMILTON grins, arches his body in the water, reaches back over his head to put his arms around MARK’s neck. Like a dog begging for his chest to be rubbed, except that he’s also begging for a kiss.)

WILL: Mark, none of has ever known …

SCOUT: Will, quiet. Ham’s gone without for two days. If we feed his ego, things could get messy.

MARK (laughing, giving HAMILTON a bit of what he wants but denying him his kiss): Close. It’d be childlike if it weren’t so damned sexy. Doing or saying something that makes him feel loved and wanted is like putting a quarter into a gumball machine.

HAMILTON (purring): Have any practical suggestions, Will?

WILL: Just the obvious: candles, incense, soft music, good wine, silk sheets. … (Sweetly:) Perhaps a bit of rope, Mark?

SCOUT: Don’t try making a living with that just yet. And I think Ham meant suggestions about our rowing problem.

WILL: Ham, either Scout or I’d be willing to try rowing stroke next spring. Neither of us can do that as well as you, but it might work out.

MARK: You mean my coxing might be less distracted? Yeh, you’re both cute, but it might. … Did you guys notice anything about cox-stroke coordination during October?

WILL: Yeh, it stopped improving. For a while it got worse. … Oh crap. You two are limiting your eye contact in the shell, aren’t you?

HAMILTON (giving MARK’s head a quick thank-you caress and straightening up): Yeh … sorry. Don’t know what to do about that. At least for this year. I’d be glad to try switching positions in the spring. But I’d like to row stroke again next year.

SCOUT: That we can do. But keep working out, Mark. You can’t cox again next year, whether Jacqueline’s back here or not.

MARK: I am keenly aware of that. And thanks a lot, guys, really. I think I can be ready to row by next summer.

HAMILTON (smiling, appreciatively scanning MARK’s arms and chest): You’ll be ready by spring. We just don’t have another cox, or a vacant rowing seat.

(Another knock on the door. The boys disengage a bit.)

SCOUT: Come in, Jen.

JENNIFER (entering with another tray of four toddies): Hi, Scout, Mark. … Will, sorry I embarrassed you. I should have known your friends, and Mark’s, would be nice. … (To HAMILTON:) Jennifer Langtree. Will and I had a lot of classes together in middle school. Mark and I’ve met.

HAMILTON (standing): Hamilton Fleming.

WILL: Thanks, Jen. But you were right. Forms exist for a reason. I need to learn them.

JENNIFER: And how to relax them. … (She sets the tray down near SCOUT’s robe, kneels, pulls the flask out of the robe pocket. Looking at SCOUT:) Couldn’t help noticing this … when you were wearing the robe.

SCOUT (standing): Strictly for modesty’s sake. Like the purse Scottish guys wear on their kilts.

JENNIFER: Yeh, right.

(JENNIFER pours brandy into each of the mugs, stirs. WILL and MARK stand and, with HAMILTON and SCOUT, approach JENNIFER, carrying their empty cider mugs.)

JENNIFER: Ya know, you guys have stolen our best. At Edmund, the honors classes aren’t the same. … (To WILL, handing him a toddy:) Bella’s stuck answering all the hard questions now.

WILL (glumly, taking the drink, handing JENNIFER his empty): So I’ve heard.

HAMILTON: Jen, I hope someday we'll be able to take more of you. But for now at least, we can’t take all of you. Do you think we shouldn’t take any of you?

JENNIFER (taking HAMILTON’s empty, handing him a toddy): Not at all, Hamilton. But there are simple, nearly costless things that you could do.

MARK (handing JENNIFER his empty, taking a fresh toddy): Like what? Hamilton’s dad is the dean.

JENNIFER: Mark, the name “Fleming” is not unknown in this town. … (To HAMILTON, handing SCOUT a drink:) Rawley and Edmund could each let kids taking mid-day courses at the other school eat lunch there. Put wi-fi in the shuttle bus. Make part of each school’s LAN accessible to students and faculty at the other, so they can see what’s on offer, and organize courses and activities together.

SCOUT (impressed, moving closer to JENNIFER): Good ideas, Jen. Ignore Fleming. My dad’s sort of his dad’s boss. And unlike him, I’m not spoken for.

JENNIFER (accepting SCOUT’s invitation to ogle him): I doubt that’ll last too long. … (She picks up the tray, stands, turns on the gas in the fireplace, adjusts it to a low flame.) … Nice to meet you, Hamilton. Again, enjoy your drinks, guys. (She leaves, to an appreciative chorus of male thanks and see-ya’s.)

*       *       *


	15. Scene 11 - A little bit o’  luck

EXT - CHARLIE BANKS’ GAS STATION, NEW RAWLEY. DAY 1 - TUESDAY (DAY - AFTERNOON)

 

(A 1920s-style canopy overhangs two late-1940s-vintage gas pumps, each topped by a gas globe [the collars for which were plastered up in the original drama], and a 1950s Eco Tireflator Model 97 air meter pump. Both foot-and-a-half-thick square columns supporting the canopy, and the outer wall of the station on the service-bay side, to the left of the window-fronted office, are wainscoted, covered below the rail in a dark-brown paint also used as trim on the gas station’s canopy and doors. The rest of the outer walls, canopy and columns is covered in dark yellow stucco. Large dark-brown paint lettering running vertically on an outer canopy column advertises “FULL SERVICE.” A third late-1940s-vintage globe-topped gas pump stands behind the canopy, nearer the cantilever-doored service bay. A green 1950-vintage pickup truck, snow carefully brushed off it, is parked near the hedge in front of and to the side of the service bay. The roof of another similar vehicle in the service bay is dimly visible through the row of windows at eye height in the cantilevered door.

     

Inside the office, visible through its window-front, are a counter, and behind it, a grey metal desk with chairs both behind and in front of it, and, in the front right-hand corner, a bright red 1930s-vintage [Westinghouse Standard Coke refrigerator-dispenser](http://soda-machines.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=644&Itemid=14), as well as a host of usual gas station paraphernalia. From an open door in the back wall of the office, a flight of stairs leads to the upstairs apartment where the CHARLIE, BELLA and GRACE Banks live. Another door, now closed, connects the office to the service bay. Not everything in the station is anomalously old, however; the cash register on the counter and the electronic diagnostics stand set against a canopy column are state-of-the-art, modernly functional.

    

CHARLIE Banks, in open parka and boots, is shoveling the pavement of his gas station. Not for the first time today – the snow on it’s only three inches deep. But nearly bare of tire-tracks – few customers in this weather. FINN, in parka, scarf, gloves and boots, a shovel over one shoulder and a tote bag slung over his other, quietly approaches from behind CHARLIE, sets down his shovel, leans up against one of the gas pumps under the canopy, removes his gloves, pushes back his hood, pulls a bottle of Irish whiskey out of his bag, dangles it from the fingers of one hand.)

FINN: Looks like dry, thirsty work, that, Charlie. Business keepin’ ya sober this fine day?

CHARLIE (turning, resting on his shovel handle): Finney me boy! You’re mitching off again?

FINN: Nah, they let me out. Nothin’ ahead of me for the rest of the day but listenin’ to fairy tales.

CHARLIE (continuing to accept the bottle’s invitation to belabor Finn’s Irish ancestry – apparently an old game): And is it the wee folk that’ll be comin’ to tell ya those after we’ve acted the maggot with that sweet sheila you’ve brought?

FINN: No, girls at the school. Fourth-years, not too wee.

CHARLIE: Too wee for you while they wear the book-and-crowns, boyo.

FINN (rolling his eyes): Ah, but next year’s always just over the hill, and Smith, Wellesley, Holyoke – they’re all so close.

CHARLIE: Wasn’t it a Barnard girl you’re were chasin’ when ya last subverted my morals? And no short trip for one so long in the tooth – all the way to “your insular city of the Manhattoes.” Still at that?

(FINN grins, shrugs, starts to open the bottle.)

CHARLIE: Don’t tell me you’re growin’ up?

FINN: Tryin’ not to. … (Offering CHARLIE the bottle:) Have one with me and I’ll help you finish, then we’ll take ‘er upstairs and make love to ‘er proper – unless ya need to stay clear-headed to count all the coin rollin’ in.

CHARLIE (taking it): To count me blessings, Finnie boy. Two lovely daughters, my good health, and the pot o’ gold that Donna’s dad left me, knowin’ she’d go through it in a flash if he left it to her. To his memory, bless ‘im. … (He takes a swig.) Ah, that’s fine. (He hands the bottle back to FINN.)

FINN: Still haven’t told Bella about that? (He drinks.)

CHARLIE: If I did she’d never leave. I’ll not be nursed to my grave by a gas-pumpin’ spinster. And while I never spend it, she’ll never know. It just does what pots o’ gold do best, boyo, keeps me warm at night.

FINN (laughing, passing the bottle back to CHARLIE): There was a time when we had better things to do that.

CHARLIE: That there was. Those were the days.

FINN (looking around): Remember ridin’ our bikes here to buy Cokes? Not much has changed.

CHARLIE: Why should it? The place is perfect. (He drinks.)

FINN: More perfect every day. The old pump globes are a nice touch. Where’d you find ‘em?

CHARLIE (passing the bottle back to FINN): I didn’t. They just showed up here Halloween night.

FINN: You must have fans. And why not? This place is a time capsule. And it’s the last full-service station in these parts.

CHARLIE: You should talk. Housemaster of the last all-boys’ boarding prep school in Massachusetts. Last other one was what, Deerfield? Went co-ed back in eighty-eight. If South Kent were a couple miles farther west, yours’d be the last one in New England.

FINN (shrugging): Not my choice. Keeping all these antiques is yours. But somehow, your prices are no higher than at any other filling station.

CHARLIE: That’s how the pot o’ gold keeps me warm nights. Lets me do what I please, as I please.

FINN: Must be a pain, gettin’ parts for half-century-old gas pumps.

CHARLIE: Yep. Takes weeks. That’s why I’ve got more pumps than I need. … (Gesturing toward his three 1940’s-vintage gas pumps:) Ever see three cars here for gas at one time?

FINN: No … only two can fit in.

CHARLIE (grinning): There ya have it. Don’t need new pumps – just an extra old one.

FINN: And the glass Coke bottles?

CHARLIE: Ship ‘em in from Mexico. The kids like ‘em. Young Krudski for example. And if he didn’t come by, how’d I know what you’re up to? You never seem to be around weekends nowadays. Who enforces the dorm rules with your famed ferocity while you’re gone?

FINN: Uh … our groundskeeper. … (He takes a swig.) I owe him, I’m afraid.

CHARLIE: Haggerty? Good grief! He’s even more of a romantic than you are.

FINN: Well … they’re pretty good kids.

CHARLIE: You’d better hope so. And most of them are. … Will thinks the world of you, you know. You should see his eyes when he talks about you … almost like a father.

FINN (glumly, handing CHARLIE the bottle): He needs one, given what he’s got. And you could have been his father, Charlie … if you hadn’t been a jerk. Your pot o’ gold’s a piss-poor second-best, isn’t it?

CHARLIE (taking a larger-than-usual swallow): Well, we all make mistakes. But I’ve got Bella and Grace. … Thanks for taking care of Will. (He hands the bottle back to FINN, hand-signals that he’s had enough.)

FINN (corking the bottle and bagging it): It’s a pleasure. One that should have been yours. … (He unslings the bag, sets it down next to a pump, picks up his shovel.) Almost enough to make me want to want a kid of my own.

CHARLIE: Not too late for that, boyo?

FINN (starting to shovel): Not quite. And my Barnard girl’s got one already.

CHARLIE (grinning): So … (He picks up his shovel and starts to [sing](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_Sj9o7DWJU):)

           The Lord above gave man an arm of iron,  
           So he could do his job and never shirk.

FINN (shoveling): The Lord above gave man an arm of iron but  
                           With a little bit o’ luck …

CHARLIE (joining him): With a little bit o’ luck,  
                                   Someone else’ll do the blinkin’ work!

(Pan out and onto GRACE Banks, trudging toward the gas station in hooded parka, gloves, jeans, and snowboots, a backpack slung over a shoulder – obviously coming home from school. She stops, watches the two slightly tight guys singing and shoveling, smiles, shakes her head.)

*       *       *


	16. Scene 12 - Rooftop revisited

INT – NEW RAWLEY INN, JACUZZI, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (LATE AFTERNOON)

 

(David Gray's _White Ladder_ album, now on [Please Forgive Me,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmFRXwYKQwU) plays softly from the sound system. SCOUT, WILL, HAMILTON and MARK float backs-up, their arms folded on the pool edge, along the window side of the pool, looking out at the snow in the fading light, their mugs in front of them, a low flame in the hearth behind them. SCOUT and MARK are in the center, WILL flanking SCOUT and HAMILTON flanking MARK.)

WILL: The toddies are growing on me. An acquired taste?

HAMILTON: No, this one’s better than the first.

SCOUT: It is. Whole tea leaves, not dust. With bitters, clove spikes and fresh ginger, not just cinnamon. All well steeped. … (To WILL:) I told Jen you’re new to toddies, she wanted to make you the best one she could. That’s why it took so long.

HAMILTON: And she seems to know your taste in tunes.

MARK (to WILL): She likes you.

WILL: It’s mutual. But …

MARK: You’re waiting for Bella.

WILL: I’m not starting anything I can’t stop when Bella’s ready. And Jen’s way too nice to toy with, and … (Looking at SCOUT:) … she and Bella are friends.

SCOUT (deflated): Oh … then I guess I won’t be asking her out either.

WILL: Sorry, guy. Otherwise I’d have introduced you to Jen months ago.

HAMILTON: Yet another person whose life might be better if you and Bella weren’t dithering, Scout.

MARK: Yeh … Bella’s uncertainty about her dad seems kinda like Jackie’s gender deception – a vortex that sucks more and more people into its whirlpool.

WILL: Ooooo … an inspired metaphor. If we were in a barnyard, would it be like muck that sticks to more and more boots?

MARK: What can I say? I’m impressionable.

HAMILTON (turning toward at MARK): Mmmm … I hope so. ‘Cause if we were in a barnyard, I’d be looking for a haystack about now. … (Grazing MARK’s side with the back of a hand:) Ya know, you and I have never sauna’d together.

MARK (pushing off from poolside into the center of the pool): No way! We’ve got a week and a half to get through. Don’t ya think maybe we should pace ourselves?

SCOUT (picking up his mug and MARK’s): Fleming, it’s a mercy to some guy that you don’t live in the dorms. … (Joining MARK, handing him his mug, putting an arm around him:) Think I could make him jealous?

MARK: Not with me, Scout, though you’re welcome to try. But I’d rather not make Will jealous. He’s nice – unlike Fleming on Tuesdays.

SCOUT (pulling MARK back onto the ledge opposite the window): If Will was cool with Ham and Bella at the drive-in, I think he’d survive you and me.

WILL: Scout, Hamilton would never steal a friend’s girl. … Maybe his guy, though. Feeling lonely, Ham?

HAMILTON: Terribly. Console me?

WILL: Anything for Jake. … (He picks up his mug, sets it down next to HAMILTON, puts an arm around him. Nibbling his neck:) Mmmm, that’s nice. … Scout, how’s Mark?

SCOUT: Rather better behaved than you, roomie.

WILL (playfully): So, if I just go slowly … and lightly … and let you think about Jacqueline?

HAMILTON: Yeh, but to get into this party, Will, you have to bring a girl who isn’t here.

WILL: Ooooo, another oxymoron. How enticing! … Couldn’t I bring an emotionally absent girl who’s scared to commit? Or my randomly assigned roommate, off of whom I can hardly keep my paws? That truly is pathetic, Ham. And you’ve been messing with both of them, despite having both a girl and a guy yourself. So help me out.

HAMILTON (casually, while gently pushing WILL back against the pool edge and taking the initiative himself): You know, Will, when you’re snogging a naked guy and asking for sexual favors, it really helps if you don’t insult him.

WILL: Anything in there that wasn’t accurate?

HAMILTON (lazily brushing the back of a hand across WILL’s chest and neck): “Randomly assigned roommate?” Really, Will. I thought you remembered how we met, first day of summer session.

WILL: How could I forget? You were so full of it. Not just pretending not to know Scout. The Feng Shui garbage, too.

HAMILTON (grazing the side of WILL’s pectoral): You liked that?

WILL: “Doors face east, windows face north”? Gimme a break. Our dorm room’s laid out so that even if the door faced east, the windows would face south, not north. I noticed that that right away. So I went online and read up on Feng Shui. It’s not about doors or windows facing a specific direction – it’s way more complex than that. Of course, you knew that, didn’t you?

HAMILTON (nuzzling WILL’s arm casually): Mmmm … Well, yes.

WILL: So what was your Feng Shui shtick? Part of pretending to be a socially inept geek, your version of the old act in which a host seems a bit bumbling in order to put his guests at ease? You’re smooth as silk when you want to be, Ham.

HAMILTON (running two fingers along the line of WILL’s jaw): Am I?

WILL (purring, but still reciprocating): Uh - huh. You came by to welcome us, not to admire our room. You welcomed every new student that day, Dean’s son, making sure they had everything they need. But in our room, you got distracted by your old friend and then interrupted by the lake run before you could get around to telling us how to find the showers and the laundry room.

HAMILTON: Well, yes, I was assigned to welcome newcomers. And the window over the door’s the best place to spot them. Shooting photos wasn’t my main reason for being there. But I didn’t drop by just to welcome you and Scout.

WILL (overcome, giving up on reciprocating HAMILTON’s attentions): God … What then?

HAMILTON (in a low, soft voice, while engaging languorously with WILL’s chest): Krudski, there is not a prep school or college in this country at which first-year roommates are assigned randomly. The rule is to assign opposites: black to white, rich to poor, foreign to domestic. Among this school’s first-year students, are any two ethnic minority, or foreign, or scholarship, or in-state students rooming together?

WILL (eyes shut now): Uh … no.

HAMILTON: But one mustn’t match students who're so unlike that they’re incompatible. It’s an art, Will, like Feng Shui – an art of placement. To do it well requires a certain social _savoir faire_ , an intuitive empathy. And this year, at this school, have any first-years requested a change of roommate?

WILL (reflexively ruffling HAMILTON’s hair): No.

HAMILTON: Tell me, who do you think is responsible for that extraordinarily felicitous outcome?

WILL: Uh … your dad?

HAMILTON: No, Krudski. The dean’s a busy man. And it takes time to assign a class of roommates. Time to read through the admission applications of all the students who end up coming, to sift the relevant information, to consider all the plausible matches, and to select those with just the right degree of dissimilar complementarity.

WILL (arching slightly): Mmmm … so who does it?

HAMILTON: Generally, the dean’s wife does it, sweet, empathetic creature that she is. But this year, someone with a personal interest in the first-year class helped, especially with certain cases.

WILL (eyes opening): You? You put me together with Scout?

HAMILTON (smiling, softly): Very good, Krudski. Perhaps that town scholarship wasn’t utterly …

(WILL, totally forgetting himself, rolls on top of HAMILTON, full frontal, kisses him passionately. HAMILTON, apparently unsurprised, lets him, reciprocating appreciatively. But it’s brief …)

WILL (recovering, disengaging, horrified by what he’s just done): Oh god, I’m sorry. … (He paddles backward until he hits the far wall of the pool. Standing:) I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

(SCOUT disengages from MARK and starts toward WILL, but MARK holds him back. HAMILTON swims to WILL, gently pulls him back down into the water, holds his head in both hands.)

HAMILTON (locking foreheads with WILL): Don’t be. That was the sweetest, most innocent kiss I’ve had from a guy since the guy I fell in love with kissed me on the school rooftop. I was dumb enough to let him leave without telling him how much I enjoyed it. I won’t make that mistake twice.

(HAMILTON kisses WILL briefly, lips-only but tenderly and a bit erotically.)

HAMILTON (pulling WILL to SCOUT): Now come be with the guy your kiss was really meant for.

(WILL, blushing, clutches SCOUT and burrows his face into SCOUT’s neck. SCOUT cuddles WILL protectively, glaring at HAMILTON.)

HAMILTON (softly): Will, you were my gift to a guy I’ve loved all my life, but had been a jerk to. I hoped you’d be for him what I wished I could have been. And you have been … perfectly Feng Shui.

(Slowly, the hostility drains out of SCOUT’s face. MARK looks at HAMILTON adoringly.)

WILL (after a pause, opening his eyes, looking up into SCOUT’s): I’m so sorry.

SCOUT (softly, choking): Will, Will … you’re perfect. Just stay.

(WILL nestles back into SCOUT.)

HAMILTON: Scout, what Will just felt, and did to me, when I told him I’d put you and him together … that’s pretty much what I felt, and did to Mark, Friday evening of Columbus Day weekend at Grottlesex, when Jacqueline told me how Mark had helped me and her get together. But when I reacted to what I’d done the same way Will just did, Jacqueline and Anne pulled me back to Mark.

SCOUT (softly): I get it, Ham.

(HAMILTON disengages from WILL, pulls MARK with him to the window side of the pool.)

HAMILTON: Anyhow, Will, I came by your dorm room the first day of summer session not just to welcome you, but to see how my matchmaking was working out. A routine quality control service … Ow!

MARK (doing something painful to HAMILTON under the water): Fleming, isn’t there something else you should be saying now?

HAMILTON: Ow! Mark! … OK. … Will, I’m sorry. I sandbagged you.

WILL (still wrapped around SCOUT, head on SCOUT’s shoulder, blissfully content): I know. … Thank you.

SCOUT (kissing WILL’s forehead): Ham, you were right. Rooming with Will is perfectly Feng Shui. Thank you. … But next time you think I’m not giving someone what he or she needs – just tell me, will you?

HAMILTON: Scout, that’s not it at all. You’ve given Will everything he needs. I just wanted you to feel how well you’ve done that.

SCOUT (blushing in turn, burrowing his face in WILL’s hair): Oh …

HAMILTON: You’ll find a girl who needs you even more than Will has, Scout. Bella didn’t. Don’t let that shake you.

(WILL, recovering, sits up, showing SCOUT he’s alright.)

MARK (wrapping his arms around HAMILTON:) Will, are we lucky or what?

WILL (looking into SCOUT’s eyes): We are.

MARK: But Scout, you and Will are letting Hammy off way too easy. He really should pay for that stunt.

HAMILTON (nuzzling MARK): Mmmm … should I?

MARK: Definitely. Because you really are a compulsively duplicitous scheming prankster who is never quite what he seems. A guy who checks the toilet stalls in the men’s room to make sure they’re empty before he kisses, for the first time, the guy he’s fallen in love with. And who says he’s throwing caution to the wind even while he checks them.

HAMILTON (burrowing his face into Mark’s side): Another debt to the future Senator? Photos for the campaign bio that Will’s gonna ghost-write?

SCOUT: Too far in the future. … (To WILL:) Got any suggestions?

WILL: Think he’d be any good at shining shoes? Or laundering clothes?

SCOUT: Are you kidding? Look at his own. I mean, when he bothers to wear any.

WILL (sweetly): Maybe Mark could suggest something.

MARK: Did Jacqueline ever tell you guys why she kissed this clown on the dorm rooftop the first week of summer session? What he did that made her forget she was pretending to be a guy?

SCOUT: I don’t remember. Will’s the one who’s written the whole story down. Did she, Will?

HAMILTON (suddenly alert): Will’s done _what_?

SCOUT: Written it all down.

HAMILTON (plainly flattered and aroused): Krudski … tell me he’s kidding.

WILL: Chill, man. Not to worry. Before I publish it – like a long time from now, when you and Jake have teenage kids of your own – I’ll change the names and other details. At least enough so that you won’t be entitled to any of the royalties. I might even make Jake have slimy green wart-covered skin instead of cross-dressing. But nah, it’ll sell better if I leave all the sex stuff in.

HAMILTON (arching, begging Mark for attention): He hasn’t really.

SCOUT: ‘Fraid he has. On St. Martin. First thing he did there.

HAMILTON (pretending lamely to be distraught while settling happily back into MARK): I’m so screwed. I can see it now, stretching endlessly into the future. Decades of listening to Krudski’s poetry, of reading his essays on Faulkner, of teaching him how to seduce naked guys in whirlpool baths, all just to keep him from publishing this crap.

MARK: Well, maybe in decades to come. But you’re not gonna be screwed this weekend, boy. Not for at least ten more days, in fact. You’re gonna have to make do with me. And I’m gonna make you wait until Thanksgiving Day, so you’ll have something to be really thankful for.

HAMILTON: I could be pretty thankful now.

MARK: Waiting’ll make the holiday more meaningful, Ham.

HAMILTON: Jake’s snowed in fifty miles away, I’m not gonna see her for a week and a half, and her designated pinch hitter chooses now to go on strike?

MARK: It'll be better Thursday. Trust me.

HAMILTON (burrowing his nose into MARK’s neck): Mark, make it all go away. I wanna think about Jake. Now. Just take me to the edge and keep me there till Thanksgiving.

MARK: Sure, Ham. Scout, ya wanna call Jennifer and ask her to bring Will a pencil and paper?

HAMILTON: No, have Jenny bring Will some Faulkner. It’s what makes him happy.

WILL: You know, Ham, there are some advantages to writing it all down.

HAMILTON: Like?

WILL: Like I remember it better. A lot better. For example, I remember that Jake said that on the rooftop, you were talking about how guys and girls fail to communicate. Because guys take everything that’s said as being about sex.

(HAMILTON swims across to SCOUT and WILL.)

HAMILTON: Excuse me, Scout. Your guy here badly needs straightening out.

(HAMILTON pulls WILL away from SCOUT and stands him up in mid-pool.)

HAMILTON (facing WILL, one hand holding WILL much too close, the other slowly brushing his abdomen): Will, you must have gotten that part wrong. You’re not stupid, and you’re a guy, and you don’t take everything as being about sex, do you? I mean, I really, really like you, Will. But when I say that, you don’t think I mean I that I wanna have sex with you, do you?

MARK (laughing): No, he knows you mean, “I’m ready for a commitment, are you?”

HAMILTON (to MARK): Traitor! … (He disengages from WILL, settles next to an amused SCOUT, pulls SCOUT’s arm around his shoulders, scowls at MARK and WILL.) … Scout, protect me. Phone Washington, tell them we have a snow emergency, have them call out the National Guard, and make them take these two cold-hearted guys out of our nice warm pool.

SCOUT: Sorry, Ham. For stuff like snow emergencies, the Guard’s the governor’s, and I just don’t have any relatives in the statehouse this year.

MARK: Hamilton, I know exactly what you said and did on the rooftop. I remember Jacqueline putting it all back together, figuring out what you’d done that made her lose it and kiss you. She really needed to talk to somebody about that, Ham, and I was there for her, while you were too busy angsting about being gay. And by the way, your whipping out your pride and joy and taking a leak wasn’t what turned her on.

SCOUT (removing his arm from around HAMILTON and pushing him away): You pissed off the rooftop? That’s gross, Fleming. Jacqueline didn’t mention _that_ on our walk to Carson.

WILL (settling back down into the pool): Maybe 'cause Bella was with us?

MARK: What Hamilton said to Jake was that whether what’s said is, “I really, really like you,” or “What are you doing this weekend?” or “I need to know where this relationship is going,” what guys mean by it, or take it to mean, is “I wanna have sex with you.” Right, Ham?

HAMILTON (snuggling back into SCOUT): Ask Krudski. He’s my Boswell.

MARK: What Hamilton was doing was giving Jake a wickedly subtle parody of the male gender role stereotype. So ironic that someone would only pick up on it if he agreed with what Ham was suggesting. Which is that not all guys think only about sex all the time, that not all of us relate to girls only that way, that some of us are interested in their personalities, not just their bodies.

SCOUT: Yeh, you’re right. But although I agree with that, I didn’t pick up on it just now.

MARK: Like I said, it’s subtle. Maybe communicating it depends a lot on how you say it. Like on body language. And maybe I forgot to try to seduce you when I repeated it just now, Scout. Forgive me?

SCOUT: This time, Mark.

MARK: Ham was implying that he’s a sensitive, caring guy who isn’t obsessed by sex. And he is, notwithstanding his performance here this afternoon. That’s exactly what Jacqueline desperately wanted – a guy who would love her for her personality, not just her body. Subconsciously, that’s part of why she was cross-dressing. So as soon as she understood what he was saying, she melted, forgot she was pretending to be a guy, and kissed him.

WILL: Fascinating. You’re right, Mark. But what were you trying to do, Ham? Jake’s kissing you wasn’t the outcome you intended … was it?

HAMILTON (rolling his eyes): Beats me.

MARK: That’s the interesting question, isn’t it, Will? Hamilton wasn’t trying consciously to seduce Jake. But he seems to have been trying to find out whether Jake was a guy like himself. A guy with whom he could discuss girls in terms of more than just sex. A guy to whom sex and gender matter less than affection and character.

WILL: A guy he could chase girls with, maybe double-date with.

MARK: Yeh. A guy he might want to be close to. Maybe even a guy for whom a gender mismatch might not be an insuperable obstacle to a relationship. … (With mock cheeriness:) A guy like me!

SCOUT: Careful, Mark. Comparing yourself to Jacqueline, even in jest …

MARK (quickly): Oh crap. You’re right, thanks. … (To HAMILTON:) Sorry, Ham. Really sorry. I try too hard to be clever sometimes.

HAMILTON: Forgiveness could be just a sauna away.

MARK: Dream on. My point’s that that kind of subtle irony is enticing. Consciously or not, Ham, you were flirting. You were already attracted to Jake, already seducing her – despite her cross-dressing. You already knew that she was hurting - that she didn’t have a dad, felt unloved by her mom, had switched schools five times, computer-hacked for a hobby – and you were responding to that. What you got is just what you were asking for. Jacqueline’s told you that, maybe?

HAMILTON: No, Harry, she’s nice. Not like you.

MARK: Well, Jackie and I worked through a lot of that the first time we got together. And while she may forgive you anything, I’ll never completely forgive you for hurting her those first few weeks. 

HAMILTON (to SCOUT:) Excuse me again. … (He swims to MARK, settles next to him, not touching him, turns his head toward him.) … I know.

SCOUT (after exchanging eye-rolls with WILL): It’s nearly dinnertime. We should go soon. But Ham, before we do, Will and I need to know – who else knows about Jacqueline, Mark, Anne and you?

HAMILTON: At Grottlesex, several people. Here, no one but Bella and you two.

WILL: Why’ve you told Bella?

HAMILTON: Partly because Bella’s too perceptive not to see how close Mark and I are, and too concerned for Jacqueline not to be torn up by it if she didn’t understand it. She saw that Jake was a girl as soon as she met her, that night at Friendly’s, remember?

 

SCOUT: Yeh. “I’d say that just about covers it.”

HAMILTON: “What?”

WILL: “Nothing!”

(They all laugh.)

SCOUT: Yeh, nothing covered Jake for Bella – she saw right through the baggy guy clothes. So if Will and I could see through you and Ham, Bella surely would have.

WILL: I wonder whether Jacqueline didn’t want us all to see through her that evening. In retrospect, her “cute coat” remark seems almost like a challenge to do that.

SCOUT: And she’d done something similar the evening before that. Remember her asking me whether I preferred Hilary Swank or Chloë Sevigny in _Boys Don’t Cry_? She sat there right in front us, in drag, and asked me how I liked a cross-dressing girl …

HAMILTON: Jake and I couldn’t tell you and Will during summer session without putting you at risk of being booted. But she and I were pretty lonely. And she felt guilty about letting my friends think I was gay. Part of her wanted to tell you the truth.

SCOUT: I’m sure. But enough of the past. … Ham, who’s _going to_ know about you and Mark, or about Jacqueline and Mark? When you finally tell people here about Jacqueline, will you tell them about all that, too?

MARK: When Jacqueline first comes back here, we’ll leave those parts out of the story we tell most people. Or at least tone them down. Some people would disapprove. They may suspect a lot of that anyhow, but to force them to deal with it wouldn’t help Jackie transfer back here. After that’s a done deal, we’ll tell the whole story to anyone who asks for it.

HAMILTON: Except for the part about Dr. Hotchkiss and me, the night of the cotillion, because, as you guys point out, he must have figured out the truth, so it could get him into trouble.

WILL (nodding): Understood.

HAMILTON: Except for that, we’ll tell the whole story to our families and friends as soon as we show them that Jake’s a girl. She, Anne, Mark and I all want to share what we’ve done and what we feel with the people we’re close to.

MARK: Even if we didn’t, we’d have to tell the whole story to them. Neither Ham and I nor Jackie and I can hide what we feel for each other.

HAMILTON: Neither can Anne and I.

SCOUT: You’re right. When Jake comes back, you will need to tell the whole story to the people you’re close to. … But you didn’t need to tell it all to Will and me today. So, apart from the fact that we asked for it, why did you?

HAMILTON (sweetly): It’s love, Scout. It’s meant to be shared. Mark and I love you guys.

SCOUT (to WILL): I’m not buying that. Are you buying that?

WILL: From this schemer? No way. What’s your game, Ham?

HAMILTON (casually): Well … Mark and I are trying to persuade Anne to transfer here with Jake.

MARK: It’d help if Anne had some friends here. Bella helps. But we could use more help.

HAMILTON: And, truth be told, we knew that you’d seen Mark with Anne, Scout.

WILL (exchanging grins with SCOUT): Ah … The wily Odysseus drops his mask.

SCOUT: Yeh … (To HAMILTON and MARK:) Bella told Jacqueline that I tried to pump her for information about the girl I’d seen visiting her with Mark last weekend?

MARK: No, she told Anne.

WILL: And you guys anticipated that when you told Scout and me that Mark knew last summer that Jake was a girl, we’d guess that his girlfriend was Jacqueline’s roommate?

(HAMILTON and MARK shrug slightly and grin.)

SCOUT: And Will and I thought we’d pried that out of you.

HAMILTON: Well, you did, sort of.

MARK: Let’s just say you seduced us, and we were willing. We did tease you a bit, telling you I knew about Jacqueline last summer. But who ya gonna blame? And Scout’s seeing Anne and me together had to mean it was time to tell you. It was like looking up and seeing mistletoe over my head.

WILL: Deeply flattering. We’re touched. Because in addition to having irresistible bods, penetrating intellects and great personalities, Scout and I just happen to be the only Rawley students, besides you two, who know Jake’s a girl. So we’re the only ones Anne can be allowed to meet.

SCOUT: And spending most weekends alone here at the Inn with Mark, delightful though he is, is starting to drive Anne nuts, right?

WILL: And you guys want Anne to make some real friends here – people she doesn’t have to lie to about how she knows Mark, and in front of whom you two don’t have to hide your fondness for each other – or for each other’s girls.

MARK: Who said all the cute ones are dumb, Ham?

HAMILTON: Hey, not me, buddy.

WILL: Right. .. (Mimicking HAMILTON:) “It’s love, Scout. It’s meant to be shared. Mark and I love you guys.”

HAMILTON: Well, we do.

(WILL and SCOUT exchange grins.)

SCOUT: It’s mutual. Mark, it’ll be my pleasure to meet Anne next time she’s here. And you already owe Will a dinner with Anne and Bella. But we should get going. … (He drains his mug, stands.) … Shall we?

HAMILTON (looking down): I’m afraid that … (Clearing his throat:) Harry here is in no condition to step out this pool. … Ow!

MARK: Neither are you, pretty boy.

HAMILTON: And whose fault is that, Dr. Come-Ye-Thankful-People-Come?

WILL (emptying his mug and standing): Well, there’s a sure cure.

MARK: Uh, guy …

WILL (smiling sweetly): Shoveling. The school guesthouses weren’t on today’s docket, just like Dr. Hotchkiss wasn’t. We’ll shovel them out before dinner. Just think how good that will feel.

MARK (moaning): Bummer.

HAMILTON (wincing): Ugghh … Yeh, highly effective.

*       *       *


	17. Scene 13 - Skin and bones

INT – RAWLEY ACADEMY, DEAN’S OFFICE, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (DAY - LATE AFTERNOON)

 

(In the well-ordered bookshelf-lined anteroom, at the larger of two wooden desks, the one nearer the door to the corridor, MARGARET Fitzpatrick, a well-preserved woman in her sixties, types efficiently at her desktop computer, dressed in grey woolen skirt, white blouse, blue cardigan, grey hair pulled back in a bun. The smaller desk, nearer the window, is vacant. On it, in addition to an old black rotary phone and a desktop computer, are two small houseplants and a glass cookie jar, half-full of frosted molasses cookies, obviously home-baked, carefully nested among layers of waxed paper. The smaller desk shares the window end of the anteroom with five straight-backed black-painted wooden chairs, the book-and-crowns Rawley seal on their headboards, set in a row against the wall adjacent to the DEAN’s office.

In the large and calculatedly intimidating book-lined main office, seen through the open door between it and the anteroom, opposite the door to the anteroom, hangs a large wooden plaque displaying the Rawley seal, the book-and-crowns, encompassed by an oval ribbon on which are inscribed the school’s motto and its name in Latin. The words on the book are the book in the seal are those found on the traditional rather than the modern version of Oxford University’s arms: _Veritas Liberabit, Bonitas Regnabit_.

To its left, DEAN Steven Fleming, a trim, angular, once-athletic man a generation younger than his secretary, sits sideways behind a plain but very large and cluttered wooden desk, apparently trying to get his computer to do something it doesn’t want to do. The remnants of afternoon tea rest atop a silver tray on the DEAN’s desk near his computer stand; a tweed sport jacket hangs on a coat stand behind his desk. A large window behind his desk offers a splendid view of a garden, although the lake in the distance is obscured by the snowfall. In front of the desk and facing it in a semi-circle are five black-painted New England-style comb-back chairs with the Rawley seal on their headboards, all without armrests – a conspicuously disciplinary arrangement.

To the right, at the opposite end of the office, away from the window, is a venue for more pleasant conversations: a large fireplace, in which a low fire burns, and in front of which, set on a large Afghan carpet, are two mission sofas, a coffee table, and two black comb-back rocking chairs with armrests flanking a small round table.

The phone on MARGARET’s desk rings.)

MARGARET (crisply): Good afternoon, Dean’s Office, Margaret Fitzpatrick speaking. … Yes, Mrs. McGrail, I’ll see whether Dean Fleming’s available. Please hold.

(MARGARET punches the hold button, sets down the headpiece, stands, walks briskly to a shelf, finds and takes down the latest Edmund High yearbook, the latest town middle school yearbook, and a folder labeled “Edmund - PTA.” She opens each yearbook to the index, sticky-flags an entry for “McGrail,” opens the folder, finds and removes the current roster of PTA officers, clips it to the front of the folder, marches into the DEAN’s office, sets the folder and the open yearbooks down on his desk, facing him, clears her throat. The DEAN gives up on whatever computer task he was attempting, emits a sigh of exasperation, turns to face MARGARET.)

DEAN: Yes, Maggie?

MARGARET: Mary McGrail on line two. Edmund High PTA president. Served as PTA secretary last year. … (She taps a finger on the folder.) ... Mother of Gail, a junior. Caught in the boys’ dorms here after hours more than once, you may recall. … (She taps the high school yearbook index page at the highlighted entry.) ... And of Sean, a freshman. … (She taps the middle school yearbook similarly.) ... Husband runs a small tool and die business, if memory serves. … (Rattling on the tea tray a plate on which two frosted molasses cookies remain uneaten:) And eat your cookies, you’re all skin and bones.

(MARGARET returns to her desk. The DEAN briefly peruses the PTA officer information, picks up the middle school yearbook, sticks a piece of paper in the index page, turns to one of the pages to which it refers him - a page with SEAN's picture, listing his activities.  The DEAN picks up the phone.)

DEAN (warmly, as though delighted to hear from an old friend): Mrs. McGrail? … Steven Fleming. … Steven, please. … Oh, I’m sure we must have. … Is Sean continuing with football this year? … Good, good. I hear the Edmund JV team’s had a winning season. Trounced our lads. … And will he play hockey again, too? … Excellent. That, sadly, is something we just don’t have facilities for here. …

(The DEAN takes a sip of tea.)

DEAN: Oh, I have a son Sean’s age. Mine’s named Hamilton, goes here. So of course I’ve heard a bit about Sean. … All good things, Mary. But I suppose you must have an older child at Edmund, too, or you wouldn’t be PTA president quite yet? … Really? … Wonderful! Can’t say as I’ve heard of Gail, sadly. Our girls’ school seems pretty much to run itself, somehow. … Yes, they are. Kate and I wish we had one ourselves. So, to what do I owe the pleasure? …

(Plainly pleased with his performance, the DEAN picks up a cookie, dunks it in his tea, takes a bite.)

 

*       *       *


	18. Scene 14 - Wonders never cease

EXT – FLEMINGS’ HOUSE, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

The Dean’s Residence of Rawley Academy. (For a description, including of the interior, see the "[Setting: The Flemings' House](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1437208/chapters/3023485)" section of the [Notes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1437208).) The driveway and walk have been shoveled, the porch swept, but snow continues to fall. HAMILTON, shovel shouldered, limps home for dinner. As he mounts the steps, the bell carillon, fainter here than on campus, plays the first two bars of the Westminster Quarters. HAMILTON rests his shovel against the porch railing, stiffly sits on the edge of an Adirondack chair, takes off his hat and gloves, unlaces his boots, unfastens his parka. He rises, takes a camera out of his parka pocket, photographs the name plate on the handle of his shovel, moves the shovel to rest against the front wall on the porch, and goes inside.

 

 

INT – FLEMINGS’ HOUSE, VESTIBULE/HALLWAY, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

The title song of “[The Way We Were](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju29bXJDHDk)“ wafts from a CD player in the library, to which speakers in all the downstairs rooms are wired. The three golden retrievers greet HAMILTON as he enters. After embracing them, HAMILTON takes off his boots, hangs his coat on a peg in the vestibule, trudges stiffly down the hall toward the kitchen, accompanied by the frisking dogs.

 

 

INT – FLEMINGS’ HOUSE, KITCHEN, DAY 1 – TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

(HAMILTON enters the kitchen doorway, stops. His jaw drops. His parents are drinking wine and making out in the kitchen. Recovering, he clears his throat and knocks on the open door. The DEAN and KATE Fleming turn to face him. They smile at him, each keeping an arm around the other’s waist.)

KATE: Hi, Munchie.

HAMILTON: Hi, mom. Dad, you’re home early. I thought you were snowed under, so to speak.

(The DEAN kisses KATE on the forehead, disengages from her, crosses the room, clasps HAMILTON’s arm.)

DEAN: Come in, Hamilton. Thanks for getting up early this morning to help with the notices.

HAMILTON: My pleasure.

DEAN: I’m not nearly so snowed under as I was. There’s news that deserves a proper telling over dinner. And to a rested listener. … (Handing HAMILTON a mug:) We made you some hot chocolate.

HAMILTON (pleasantly surprised): Thanks. … (Taking a sip:) Mmmm, that’s good.

KATE: And we’ve drawn you a bath. There’s just time for that before dinner. We’re due at the girl’s school at eight. Dress nicely.

HAMILTON (astonished): Uh … thanks again. What’s happening at the girls’ school?

DEAN: “Fudge and Fairy Tales,” I believe they’re calling it.

HAMILTON (eyes brightening): Fudge?

KATE: Yes, home-made fudge. Among other things. You think the girls painted their nails while you guys shoveled their walkways? They baked. Now go take that bath, and be downstairs in half an hour.

HAMILTON: Wonders never cease. (He drains his mug, sets it down.)

DEAN: You should talk.

HAMILTON: Excuse me?

DEAN: Don’t mind me, I’m an idiot. Now run along and let your mother and me get back to what we were doing.

(HAMILTON backs out of the kitchen, almost tripping over a dog. His feet patter up the stairs, the dogs following. KATE stifles a laugh.)

DEAN: “Of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.”

KATE (nuzzling him affectionately): You should talk.

DEAN: Well, we have half an hour to put a dinner on the table.

KATE: Our grad school special?

DEAN: Sure. Do something a few hundred times and you never forget how.

(They kiss sweetly, then set to work.)

 

*       *       *


	19. Scene 15 - Our town

EXT - CHARLIE BANKS’ GAS STATION, NEW RAWLEY, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

(Through the falling snow, the word “GAS” shines in bright neon-lit script from the pediment of the 1920s-style canopy of CHARLIE Bank’s gas station. The gas globes glow atop their late-1940s pumps. Inside the office, GRACE Banks, tending the station, sits at the office desk, in sweater and jeans, reading a textbook. She has shed baby fat since the previous summer. Her parka hangs on one of a rack of pegs on the back wall, near the stair-door.

MARY McGrail’s 4-wheel-drive SUV, tires chained, wipers beating, headlights on, slowly pulls up in the street in front of the gas station. MARY, still wearing her trenchcoat, drives. SEAN rides in the back seat, BELLA in front, both wearing down parkas.)

MARY: Last stop before the McGrail house. Thanks for helping, Bella.

BELLA: My pleasure, Mrs. McGrail. Thank you for organizing it all.

SEAN: Yeh, mom. The preppies … it’s fun to make fun of ‘em, but some of them aren’t half bad.

MARY: Well, bad or good, they’re part of our town, Sean. … Say hi to Charlie and Grace for me, Bella.

(SEAN gets out and opens BELLA’s door for her. She stands up. They hold thickly gloved hands, parka-hooded face to parka-hooded face.)

SEAN: Good night, beautiful.

BELLA: You still make me feel so safe.

SEAN: I’m glad. But feeling safe’s not what you need, is it, princess?

BELLA: No.

SEAN: Right. What is?

BELLA: To learn to live with the fact that nothing really is safe.

SEAN: Yeh. … How’s that goin’?

BELLA: It’s hard, Sean.

SEAN: Bella, you’ll get there. I don’t know when, or how. But we both know who with. And when you’re ready, you’ll love him so well that you’ll love everybody and everything, including me, through him. And whoever I end up with, you’ll be part of what I love through her.

BELLA (brushing back a tear): You better not talk like that around Will, Sean.

SEAN: Why not?

BELLA: You’re already better than he is at sports. If you start spouting philosophy better, too, he could get mighty jealous.

SEAN: Get outta here.

BELLA (kissing SEAN on the cheek): Good night, Sean.

(SEAN watches BELLA go inside, gets into the front seat, closes the car door.)

 

 

INT - CHARLIE BANKS’ GAS STATION, NEW RAWLEY. DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

(GRACE, on duty, is reading her textbook at the office desk as BELLA walks in.)

BELLA: Hi, Grace. Slow night, huh?

GRACE: Not a lot of demand for gas. Can’t drive in or out of town.

BELLA (removing her boots): Whatcha reading?

GRACE (raising her textbook to let BELLA see the cover –  _American History_ ): Winter issue of _Seventeen Magazine_. The weather’s put a damper on my love life, too.

BELLA: I thought dawning good sense had been doing that. Haven’t seen much of Joe or Ryder around here all semester.

GRACE: Not good sense, big sister. Poverty and scarcity. Nice guys are all I can afford now. And the few hot ones who aren’t taken are all waiting for you to choose one of them.

BELLA: Funny. Just pray you’re ready when the right one turns up. ‘Cause they sort of make you realize how unready you are.

GRACE: That’s just the kind of encouragement that every fourteen-year-old girl needs.

BELLA: Sorry. I’m bummed. I know you are too. We’ll get through it, Grace.

GRACE: Yeh, I’ll be fifteen next month. Things are bound to get better. I mean, look at you.

BELLA: Funny again.

GRACE: Not really. … Get enough invites for all the preps?

BELLA: More than enough, thanks. … Is Dad still up?

GRACE: He was down here shoveling again ten minutes ago.

BELLA: I’ll go see. Enjoy the peace and quiet.

GRACE: Thanks. It’s weird, but I kinda do.

(BELLA goes upstairs.)

 

 

INT - BANKS’ LIVING ROOM, ABOVE THE GAS STATION, NEW RAWLEY. DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

(CHARLIE sits in a chair, reading a book, feet up on a footstool, nursing a cup of coffee, as Bella enters from the stairway.)

CHARLIE: Hi, Bella. Glad Mary could get you home. Had dinner?

BELLA (hanging her parka in a closet near the head of the stairs): Yeh. Ms. McGrail had pizzas for us. She said Mrs. Krudski gave them to her, at the beauty parlor this morning. … You know, I bet Will put them up to this.

CHARLIE: He probably just mentioned the situation to Susan. Will’s no fool, he knew what would happen. But it would have happened anyhow, maybe a bit later and less well. This town’s women …

BELLA (smiling): Yes, it would. … I saw your e-mail to Mary. I’m glad we’ll be hosting one of them. But I was surprised by your request.

CHARLIE: That they send us Scout Calhoun?

BELLA: Yeh. It must hurt you just to see him. He’s gotta bring back painful memories. Are you sure you want to spend Thanksgiving with him?

CHARLIE (puts down his book, smiles): You know, you need me a lot less than you think you do. Sit down.

(CHARLIE takes his feet off the footstool. BELLA sits on it.)

CHARLIE: Sure, it hurts me to see Scout, or to hear his name, or to read about his father in the paper. But the only way that’s going to get better is for me to come to know him and to think of him as more than an echo of my own past. It’s Thanksgiving, Bella. And for better or for worse, Scout Calhoun is family. And not just yours.

BELLA: You mean Grace’s?

CHARLIE: He’s the half-brother of her half-sister. Sooner or later, Grace has to know. Can you think of a better way to tell her? I think Scout’s the best face we can put on it for her. He really is a nice guy. Having him as family is the one good thing to come out of this mess.

BELLA: You think Grace is ready?

CHARLIE: Life doesn’t always wait for us to be ready, does it? As much as losing your mom hurt you, it hurt your sister even worse. But at least Grace no longer seems to need to tell the world it’s not good enough to make any demands of her.

BELLA: OK, let’s do it. This’ll be a Thanksgiving to remember. … (She shifts onto CHARLIE’s lap, hugs him. Sniffing:) Oh … Toothpaste doesn’t cover that up, you know.

CHARLIE: Finn came by.

BELLA: Bearing gifts?

CHARLIE: A bottle of Bushmills – still two-thirds undrunk. And this. … (Turning over his book, Neal Stephenson’s _Cryptonomicron_ :) New author – kinda like Conrad, but weirder. … He was asking about you and Grace. Especially about how you’re doin’ at school. Maybe the teaching’s getting to him. But he’s still fun to drink with.

BELLA: I’m flattered. But how can you read anything like Conrad after polishing off a sixth of a bottle of whiskey?

CHARLIE: A skill acquired by a misspent youth.

BELLA: Do as I say, not as I did?

CHARLIE: Smart girl. But you could do worse than me.

BELLA (nestling into CHARLIE’s arms): Yeh, I could.

 

*       *       *


	20. Scene 16 - Mementos

EXT - RAWLEY GIRLS’, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

(The DEAN, KATE and HAMILTON, all in parkas, accompanied by the three golden retrievers, trudge past the signpost toward the entrance to the girl’s school along the much-trodden and recently-shoveled but already again snow-covered path from the boys’ campus.)

DEAN: So tomorrow morning, I’m told, I’ll receive from Mrs. McGrail a list of some four hundred Edmund High families that have offered to host a Rawley student for Thanksgiving dinner. Then we’ll have to assign students to about three hundred twenty of those families. And let the families know whether a student will be coming and, if so, who.

HAMILTON: Only three hundred and twenty, Dad? I thought we had more students than that.

KATE: We do. But a few asked to take today’s exams early and left before the storm hit. And our faculty families will be taking as many of our students as we can. This year we’ll have a lively crowd at our house - not just the two or three foreign students we usually host.

DEAN: And we need to ensure that our students don’t arrive at their hosts’ homes empty-handed. We’ll have to ask the girls to bake three hundred twenty desserts, breads or pastries.

HAMILTON: Won’t all this baking deplete our already low stocks of food?

(They arrive at the front entrance to the girls’ school – a carriage entrance – but linger outside, under the canopy.)

KATE: Oh, we have oodles of baking ingredients. None of that spoils quickly or takes up much space, so we can keep a large inventory. It’s the bulky, perishable stuff that we’re short of. We may end up baking our own bread.

HAMILTON: Got it, thanks.

(The bell carillon, heard more faintly here than at the boys’ school, begins to play all four bars of the Westminster Quarters and strike eight.)

DEAN: But I’d also like to send the kids out with something that lasts longer than food … a memento of the school. Kate, I’d like to talk with Hamilton about that. Would you please go ahead inside and announce the good news about Thanksgiving dinner? And the bad news about the extra baking?

KATE: Steven, you’re the Dean …

DEAN: Yes, but you’re leading this evening’s activity. Besides, it’s always the women who make Thanksgiving, isn’t it? I think a woman could announce this best. Hamilton and I will be along shortly.

KATE: Anything to spare a fragile male ego, Steven.

(HAMILTON opens the front door of the girls' school for his mother.)

KATE: Counsel him sagely, Hamilton. (She kisses HAMILTON on the cheek and goes inside.)

DEAN: For memento gifts … We used to have a large stock of Rawley paperweights. Have you ever seen any of those?

HAMILTON (closing the door): Sure I have.

DEAN: Have any idea where they might be?

HAMILTON: They’re in the groundskeeper’s storeroom, in crates under the stairway.

DEAN: Well, what do you think?

HAMILTON: I think we could easily do better.

DEAN: Really? You don’t think they’d do?

HAMILTON: Dad, we have a large stock of those because they’re ugly and obsolete. Even alumni wouldn’t buy them. And that was years ago, when people used paper a lot more than they do now. This is the computer age, paperweights are ludicrous. And that’s why I know where they are. I can’t resist showing our huge stock of Rawley paperweights to my friends, who laugh their heads off.

DEAN (dejectedly): Oh. … But I don’t know what else we have.

HAMILTON: We don’t have anything. So we’ll have to make something.

DEAN: Like what?

HAMILTON: How about a wall calendar? It’s one of the few paper goods that people still really use and like. It should be easy to make. We have the printing shop that we use for the school paper and the alumni newsletter. And it’s the time of year when calendars are wanted.

(From inside the building, cheers and applause.)

DEAN: Sounds like the kids are duly appreciative. But continue. What kind of calendar?

HAMILTON: Why not a “Rawley Town and Gown” calendar? Aren’t town-school relations what this is about? I’ve shot hundreds of photos around campus and town at all seasons of the year. They’re all filed in my darkroom, down in our cellar. I could gather up, say, forty, and let you pick the baker’s dozen you’d like to use.

DEAN: Sounds good. But there’s more to a calendar than photos.

HAMILTON: The date matrices are just spreadsheet stuff. We plug in that information, including national and religious holidays, from next year’s calendars online. And we add some local items from the our school calendar, the town school calendars, and the history pages of the school and town websites.

DEAN: What will you need, and can you do it in one day?

HAMILTON: I can find out here this evening. The school paper’s basically a girls’ school operation, isn’t it? The _Rag_ office is in the cellar of this building, and the editor-in-chief’s always a girl. Reputedly because the powers that be – that’s you – think female editors need less supervision.

(The DEAN winces.)

HAMILTON: So get me the editor-in-chief – Jan Pierce, right?

DEAN: Right.

HAMILTON: And she’ll get me her techies, and they’ll show me what’s available. I’ll be back to you with an answer before Rumpelstiltskin stomps a hole in the floor, or however it is that this evening’s drama ends. Just save me some fudge, OK?

DEAN: OK. Let’s go find Miss Pierce. A remarkable young lady.

HAMILTON (shooting his father a quizzical glance): Yeh … very.

(The DEAN and HAMILTON enter the building. The three dogs lie down under the carriage entrance canopy.)

 

*       *       *


	21. Scene 17 - Knitting and poking

INT - COMMON ROOM, RAWLEY GIRLS’, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

(The lights are dimmed, save for a fire blazing in a large hearth, over which, as in the common room of the boys’ school, hangs the Rawley crest, bearing the motto, **_VERITAS EST VIRTUS_**. Around it, about two hundred students sit on the floor, save for some who congregate near tables, by the opposite wall, laden with fudge, cookies, muffins, and pitchers of hot chocolate. Most of the students wear a preppy mix of rumpled dress and casual clothing; many wear sweaters.

SCOUT, MARK, BRANDON and STEWART are seated on the floor with LENA Rosenfeld, LIZ Johnson and BROOKE Sumner toward one side of the room. ALICE Liddell and DOROTHY Gale sit together farther toward the back. RYDER leans against a wall at one end of the food tables with WENDY Darling and SUSAN Pevensie, who take turns putting pieces of fudge in his mouth and melting them with their tongues. FINN and the GROUNDSKEEPER also stand at the back, drinking hot chocolate. Next to the GROUNDSKEEPER stands a rotund middle-aged woman in a white full-length apron with the Rawley seal embroidered on its pocket, her hair pulled back into a bun – Mrs. Haggerty, the manager of Rawley’s dining services.

Directly in front of the hearth, three high, black-finished comb-backed wooden rocking chairs with arm rests and the Rawley crest painted on their headboards, a knitting stool beside each, are ranged around a small round table in a semicircle facing the students. On the table are a single, large, open leather-bound book and a lit candlestick in a round flat brass holder with a finger-hole. In each rocking chair sits a fourth-year student of the girls’ school, hair pulled back in a bun, shawl over her shoulders, blanket over her legs, knitting.

At either side of the fireplace is a high comb-backed wooden armchair with the Rawley crest on its headboard. In one, KATE sits, shawl around her shoulders, the DEAN, in a tweed sport jacket, seated on the floor at her feet. From the other, WILL Krudski is rising.)

KATE: Thank you, Will. I suspect few of us had ever thought of the “test of true love” in “The Frog Prince” as a thought experiment anticipating the experience of growing old in marriage, and the power of compassion to generate passion as we do.

(Applause, a few shouts of “well done,” as WILL walks toward SCOUT.)

RYDER (loudly): Well done indeed, Krudski. You’ve got real insight into growing old. Bought yourself a plot yet?

KATE (just as loudly): Mr. Ryder, would you please throw another log on the fire and poke it for us?

(RYDER slinks forward, hands in pockets.)

KATE: Ah, that’s a dear. … Now, who’d like to choose our last tale? The rules remain the same. Our readers will read any fairy tale you choose, but you must then lead our discussion of it, and help us find something in it that some of us have not found before. Something that we couldn’t grasp when we first heard it as children.

(RYDER tosses on a log, grabs the poker, stirs the fire. WILL seats himself near SCOUT, MARK, BRANDON, STEWART, LENA, LIZ and BROOKE. LENA raises her hand.)

KATE: Lena?

LENA: Mrs. Fleming, I’d like to hear “The Fisherman and His Wife.”

KATE: Very well, Lena. Come sit by the fire.

(LENA stands, walks to the chair vacated by WILL and seats herself in it. The FIRST KNITTER puts down her knitting, picks up the book and candle, while her two companions continue to knit. RYDER returns the poker to its rack and starts to slink away.)

KATE: Oh Ryder, don’t leave. Somebody must tend the fire, and you’re so good at poking.

(Snickers and chortles from the crowd.)

KATE (to RYDER): Come sit down by me. I so like having men on both sides of me.

(More snickers from the students, few of whom had failed to notice RYDER’s performance by the food tables. As the FIRST KNITTER finds the requested story in the book, JAN Pierce and NANCY Hofstadter, followed by HAMILTON, enter from the rear of the room. They stand by the food tables. HAMILTON catches his father’s eye, beckons to him, then turns to JAN.

HAMILTON (softly, to JAN): So, Jan, are you still with Fred Newhouse? And Alice with Steve Appleton?

JAN (equally softly, amused, eyes twinkling): Do you need to ask, boy?

HAMILTON (grinning): No. Do Fred and Steve like William and Mary? Doing well there?

JAN (affectionately): Very much and very well. We’ll talk tomorrow, with Alice.

KATE: Ladies, shall we start the reading?

FIRST KNITTER: Once upon a time there were a fisherman and his wife who lived together in a squalid shack by the sea. Every day the fisherman went out fishing. One day, when he was fishing and looking into the clear water, his hook went to the bottom, deep down, and when he pulled it out, he had caught a large flounder. …

(The DEAN touches KATE’s hand, nods toward HAMILTON and JAN. KATE nods to him.)

FIRST KNITTER: The flounder spoke to him, saying: “Fisherman, I beg you to let me live. I am not an ordinary flounder, but an enchanted prince.” So the fisherman put the flounder back into the water, got up, and went home to his wife in their squalid shack.

(The SECOND KNITTER sets down her knitting and takes the book and candle. The FIRST KNITTER resumes knitting. The DEAN quietly rises and walks around the students to the food tables. RYDER shrugs and smiles at KATE with mock sympathy. )

SECOND KNITTER: “Husband,” said the woman, “didn’t you catch anything today?” – “Wife,” said the man. “I caught a flounder, but he told me that he was an enchanted prince, so I let him swim away.” – “Didn’t you ask for anything first?” said the woman. …

(The DEAN reaches HAMILTON, JAN and NANCY. HAMILTON opens a door to a corridor, holds it open while all four exit through it.)

 

*       *       *


	22. Scene 18 - Fudge …

INT - CORRIDOR, RAWLEY GIRLS’, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

DEAN: Good evening Jan, Nancy. Sorry to keep you from the entertainment.

JAN: Happy to help, Dean Fleming.

HAMILTON: Dad, Jan does the layout for _The Rawley Rag_ herself. Nancy handles the printing. Please tell him the verdict, ladies.

NANCY: Except for photographs, we have everything we need to make four hundred very nice wall calendars in one day.

DEAN: Outstanding. Might I impose on you to spend tomorrow working with Hamilton to do that?

JAN: We’d be delighted. But we’ll need more people. Before the layout, we’ll have to do online research and spreadsheet work. After the printing we’ll need to assemble and envelope the calendars.

HAMILTON: Yeh, we’ll need, maybe, one person who’s good with spreadsheets, one who can find things online, and two who are patient and meticulous. Could you and Nancy put together a team like that?

NANCY: Easily. From the _Rag_ staff, in fact.

JAN: If we can absolve them of baking duties.

DEAN: You can.

HAMILTON: Dad, I can have the photos ready for you to look over after breakfast. Could you choose the ones that we’re going to use between then and eight-thirty?

DEAN: Barring unforeseen emergencies, yes.

HAMILTON: Then I should be able to be here, ready to roll, by nine. Shall we meet downstairs in the _Rag_ office and print-shop suite?

JAN: It’s a date.

DEAN: Thank you all. Shall we catch the last of the fairy tales? Oh, and Hamilton, I did grab some fudge for you. (He fishes a piece of fudge, wrapped in a napkin, out of his jacket pocket.)

HAMILTON (taking the fudge): Thanks, Dad. I’m sure it'll taste better for having aged in tweed.

(All four re-enter the common room, the DEAN holding the door for the girls.)

 

*       *       *


	23. Scene 19 - … and fairy tales

INT - COMMON ROOM, RAWLEY GIRLS’, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

(The DEAN, skirting the seated students, walks to reseat himself on the floor near his wife; Kate holds his hand. HAMILTON, JAN, and NANCY get some hot chocolate and fudge, and listen to the reading from near the food tables.  The other students remain where they were when last seen.)

THIRD KNITTER: “Flounder, flounder, in the sea,  
                           come, I pray thee, here to me;  
                           My wife, avid Ilsebill,  
                           Wills not what I’d have her will.”

“What does she want now?” said the flounder. – “Now,” said the fisherman, “she wants to become like God.” – “Go home,” said the flounder. “She is sitting in her squalid shack again.” And they are sitting there even today. (She puts the book and candlestick down on the table and resumes knitting.)

KATE: Time to earn your story, Lena. Oh, and Ryder, be a dear and poke the fire a bit, will you?

LENA (standing, facing the audience): If you’ve heard this story before, please raise your hand.

(About two-thirds of the students raise a hand. RYDER rises, grabs the poker, pokes the fire.)

LENA: Now, if you have your hand raised, please keep it raised if, when you first heard this story, you thought that the fisherman’s wife’s last wish was granted.

(All the hands go down. LENA turns toward KATE.)

LENA: That’s why I asked for this story to be read tonight. Because, you see, the wife’s final wish was granted. The poor are more like God than is a king, or an emperor, or even a Pope. That’s the point.

(HAMILTON, JAN and NANCY finish their hot chocolates, put some fudge on a napkin, and sit down on the floor at the edge of the group.)

RYDER (sitting down again): How touching! Other fairy tales say that, too. But they’re in another book.

ALICE: Lena, your point does seem intended, and, yes, one doesn’t understand it as a child. But the child’s understanding is valid, too, isn’t it? Even though, in one sense, the wife’s wish is granted, in another sense it’s denied. She doesn’t get what she wants – instead she’s punished for her greed.

LENA: Exactly, Alice. The child’s and the grown-up’s understandings are both true … (Gesturing toward the mantle:) True in the very old sense of “truth” on our school crest. Two things that are logically contradictory can both be true in that sense. They can both help us grow morally and emotionally. The fisherman’s wife isn’t given what she wants, but she is given what she needs. She succeeds by failing.

BROOKE: How does she succeed, Lena? At the end of the story, she’s no better than she was at the start.

LENA: No, Brooke, she’s not. But by becoming poor again, she gains a better chance to grow morally than she would have had as king, or emperor, or pope.

WILL: And what’s so great, morally, about poverty? I’m not really poor, but I’m a lot closer to it than almost anyone else here. Yet I’m no better morally than a lot of you rich kids. I’ve been awed, repeatedly, by the kindness and love I’ve found here.

RYDER: Ah, it’s heartwarming to be appreciated.

WILL: There are, of course, exceptions. But they serve to prove the rule.

LENA: Will, I think the traditional view is that the poor are like God in that they suffer. That God is compassionate, that God suffers with us everything that we suffer. That we love God by loving one another and hurt God when we hurt one another.

WILL: But in that view, suffering doesn’t make God compassionate. God suffers because he’s already compassionate. And does suffering always make people compassionate? Some people suffer a lot without becoming compassionate.

(WILL looks at RYDER, who turns away and gazes into the fire.)

LENA (following WILL’s gaze): Yes, they do. … Maybe the traditional view is like a child’s understanding, true but not the whole truth. Maybe we’ve grown and learned to use better things that it didn’t trust us to use well, like wealth, and power, and sex. But that’s not the whole truth either, is it? We still don’t know to use them very well, do we? Isn’t that the moral of this story for us?

BRANDON: You’ve lost me.

LENA: I mean, even grown up, do we know what we should wish for? Even a thousand years after this story was first told, can we say what the fisherman’s wife should have wished for?

SCOUT: A bigger house for everyone? Maybe not a perfect wish, but a better one than hers.

LIZ: Is it, Scout? A bigger house didn’t make her happier. How about to be grateful for what she had?

DOROTHY: Less materialistic, but no less selfish.

LIZ: Then how about for everyone to be grateful? Or for everyone to love one another?

MARK: That robs us of free will, Liz. And of the joy of growing. Of learning how to be more grateful, and to love better, than we know how to wish for.

(LIZ smiles at MARK.)

SUSAN: How about wishing for nothing?

WENDY: We aren’t here to do nothing, girl.

WILL: How about just wishing for the best – without pretending to know what it is?

RYDER: You’re sure that’s different from wishing for nothing, William?

WILL: Certain people serve to remind us that it is, Ryder.

LENA: Will, I think you’ve nailed it. We don’t know what our best is, but we’re not it yet. When we were little, we knew that. As we get older, we need to be reminded of that. Fairy tales do that. They humble us. They help us feel like little kids again, aware that we need to grow. And maybe this one isn’t really about rich and poor.

STEWART: What else could it be about?

LENA: Maybe it’s more about young and old, Stewart. I mean, what little kids wish for most isn’t usually money, is it? It’s to be grown up. And grown-ups wish they were young again. So maybe wealth is a metaphor for age in this story. Maybe it’s saying that we’re most like God when we’re like little children, when we’re aware that we need to grow.

WILL: That too, as Ryder says, is in another book.

LENA: It is. Will, I’m sorry, that’s not much of an answer to your question, but it’s the best I can do.

KATE (standing): You’ve done very well, Lena. Our thanks to you, to all our story-choosers this evening, and to our readers.

(The students and the DEAN join KATE in standing and applauding. A few whistles and shouts of “well done.” The GROUNDSKEEPER, standing near the light switches, turns on the ceiling lights. The three readers rise, fold their blankets, untie their hair, and bag their knitting.)

DEAN: And thank you, Kate. … And congratulations, everyone, on having survived fall term.

(Cheers all round.)

DEAN (holding up a hand): Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll be rousting you out of bed at seven tomorrow morning for a day of shoveling, baking, or learning how to fill in for our dining hall or maintenance staff so they can have some time off.

(A chorus of groans, loudest from the boys.)

DEAN: After that, you’ll have a four-day-long opportunity to get a head start on winter term coursework.

(Dead silence and incredulous eye-rolls.)

DEAN (after a pause): But … we are on break. From tomorrow until lights-out Sunday evening, hours and dress rules are suspended, and any student is welcome in the common areas of either school.

(Cheers and applause all round.)

DEAN: We’ll have a poetry reading with hot mulled cider at seven tomorrow evening in the boys’ school common room …

FINN: A showing and discussion of _Casablanca_ Friday evening …

KATE: And a snow-sculpture contest on Sunday. Details will be on the LAN by Friday.

DEAN: And on Thursday, thanks to the townsfolk of New Rawley, we feast.

(Still louder applause and cheers.)

 

*       *       * 


	24. Scene 20 – Veritas est virtus

EXT - RAWLEY GIRLS’, DAY 1 - TUESDAY (NIGHT)

 

A windless lull in the storm, snow falling only lightly. The boys who are leaving the girls’ school – a goodly number, including SCOUT, WILL, HAMILTON, MARK, BRANDON and STEWART, but somehow rather fewer than were in the common room only moments ago – gather in the driveway for what appears to be a school tradition after such evenings at the girls’ school. Led by four upperclass boys who seem to form an _a cappella_ group, they sing, softly, slowly, and surprisingly well, the appropriate verse of the [Gaudie](http://ingeb.org/Lieder/gaudeamu.html):

           _Vivant omnes virgines_  
 _Faciles, formosae_ …

In what appears to be the traditional acknowledgment, a banner, suspended from two nylon stockings, is unfurled from a second-floor window near the entryway. It’s a pair of boy’s boxer shorts, on which is scrawled, in lipstick:

_VERITAS EST MULIERITAS_

Its appearance evokes an appreciative cheer.

The DEAN and KATE, watching from the signpost, with the three golden retrievers, kiss fondly.

 

END OF ACT I

 [For ACT II, click here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1438222/chapters/3024958).

 

*       *       *


End file.
